The Varying Shades Of Peony
by The Very Last Valkyrie
Summary: Beautiful. Dirty. Rich. The year is 1899, and society belle Blair Waldorf rules the ballroom. Desired by many and envied by all, Blair seems above reproach...until the one person with the power to ruin it all returns with his heart set on her destruction.
1. Preface

**Preface**

_Metropolitan Opera House, New York  
>1897<em>

He was eighteen when he found her, sourced her to the room with the gilded ceiling by her breathy little cries; he thought she looked too young to be playing that game, the game with her hand moving restlessly beneath her pale blue skirt, all alone in the ladies' lounge at the opera.

"Bass!" She had gasped.

Up until then, their relationship had consisted of but two words, and now he spoke the second.

"Waldorf."

Her shoulders sloped delicately downward, rising and falling as she sought each breath. "You won't tell?"

"Not if you show me again."

Her stomp past him had been delightful, and the hazy golden room was still redolent of a cat in heat. She was sixteen years old, still willful, beautiful but unaware of anything but the heavy sleeves slipping from her shoulders, the curls coming loose from her coiffure. He hadn't turned to watch her go but had felt her, followed her with every sense he possessed...perhaps Blair Waldorf, with her little pink tongue parting her overripe lips, wasn't too young to be a player after all.

_TBC_

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><p><em><strong>Shhh - I'm supposed to be on hiatus<strong>**. Drop me a line and tell me what you think, and we'll go from there *winks emphatically*  
><strong>_


	2. One Night On Fifth

**1. One Night On Fifth**

_Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York  
>1899<em>**  
><strong>

Sometimes, the sheer amount of artifice in her world amused Blair Waldorf; at other times, it sickened her. Looking around the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, her dress an improbably deep green silk trimmed with golden fringe, she was inclined to favour the former. For every old Dutch family the room could boast, there was a Schwartz turned Sparks, a Hazmat become Hayes, and that was diverting. So many coats turned, so many pretty faces covering for stabbed backs – was it any surprise that she gained a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that her own name had given rise to one of the most elegant addresses in the city?

Blair felt that familiar triumph now, though she had long been wanting out of this crush. The terrace called to her, bathed in blue moonlight, bringing her pretty profile into relief as one from the line of never-ending Vanderbilt boys lit her dyed green cigarettes (Blair only smoked to please the gossips, but she was damned if she would do so without some class).

"B!"

Serena van der Woodsen turned as she floated past in the arms of one Aaron Rose, forcing the young man to pull up short when she came to an undeniable halt. Serena beamed to gloss over the awkward moment, patting her partner lightly on the arm as one might a dog upon the head. Blair raised her gloved fingertips to her rouged lips as if she were shocked, but in truth she was concealing a smile.

"Blair!" One fair tendril had already slipped from the confection Serena was sporting atop her head – liberally dotted with fresh flowers and what might have been diamonds – and it bounced on Blair's shoulder as they embraced. Serena, the taller of the two, took the opportunity to whisper, "Not only does Mr Aaron Rose think very highly of himself and speak of nothing but his 'art', but his dancing has ensured that my poor toes are crushed to death! Never again!"

Therein lay the major difference between the two girls, height and appearance excluded. Serena, who was willowy and blonde with eyes the colour of a late summer sky, liked to 'take the waters' by dancing with every vaguely eligible bachelor she could find in the hope of one day hitting upon a good combination. If a dance was not enjoyable and the partner was no better, she would simply decline thereafter; Blair, however, was different. Even now she was aware of her mother's watchful gaze upon her, and dropped a neat little curtsey to the bumbling Mr Rose, just in case his feelings had been at all wounded by Serena's flagrant disinterest. The lady in question rolled her eyes to Heaven, and Blair rose smartly and took her arm.

"Thank you so for the dance, Mr Rose," Serena called back over her shoulder as they left him. It hardly mattered, for society would let Serena van der Woodsen get away with just about anything, so long as she did not withdraw herself from its sphere and make the young men contentious and surly as a consequence.

"That was rude," Blair remarked as they reached the relative privacy of a crushed velvet settee. Serena flopped onto it with one hand on her laced stomach, searching for its contours beneath her peacock blue gown.

"Larissa pulled me in so tight, I can barely breathe."

"You were still very rude."

"I was, wasn't I?" She sat back with a sigh, then laughed at Blair's appalled face. "Ah, poor appropriate B. What is life without someone to make sport of, to leave hanging?"

"The period between birth and death," her friend replied wryly. "And one day, S, you will slight the wrong gentleman and get yourself into a world of trouble."

"So may I be rude until then?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Blair noted the rapid fluttering of her mother's fan. With a quiet word to Serena, she rose and glided seamlessly away through the crowd, acknowledging their greetings and repetitions of her name with a well positioned smile which hid all her thoughts.

"Mother."

Eleanor Vervelde Waldorf had bestowed her great beauty upon her daughter and then promptly lost it herself, remaining elegant but pinched and lemon sour as the years went on. Her gown tonight was lavender, with a wide lace collar and a sash which looked to be cutting her in half; she was the Madam Guillotine of society mothers, not only determined that her daughter should be the belle of it all but also that she should care for nothing and no one but doing so.

Now that lady smiled sharply and spoke behind her hand. "Darling, I know that Serena is your very particular friend, but it would do you no harm to visit with Penelope Needhold for a while." She gestured circumspectly at a dark haired girl across the room, resplendent in sugar pink and ostrich plumes direct from Paris. "She has, after all, just this week returned from her honeymoon, and must be eager to gossip with a girlfriend such as you." Eleanor's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Not to mention that Needhold Senior has struck black gold – oil – out west. You could do much worse than to associate with someone with those connections."

Blair flicked open her own fan, a construction of stunning gold lace which matched the fringe on her dress, and used it dexterously to obscure her expression. She longed once again to be out on the terrace, breathing in the night air and tasting its sweetness. She doubted, however, whether she would ever have any control over her life while her mother still lived and reigned as mistress of their household. Eleanor's dearest wish was for Blair to marry, and from time to time it was Blair's too. She knew she would, someday, but was it worth trading in her domineering mother for an equally domineering husband?

Penelope Needhold was far from lucky in the eyes of Blair Waldorf, though one would not have known it as the latter showed her small white teeth in a perfect smile for the former.

"You look wonderful, Mrs Needhold, utterly French."

The new Mrs Needhold was a handsome girl with strong, fine features, formerly known as Shafai. There was mischief written on her face as she regarded Blair. "But you, dearest Blair, are New York through and through." She slipped her arm through Blair's, murmuring as they started back to Serena, "Lord preserve me from one more moment with Mr Needhold! I miss Henry –" Henry Buckland, her former and ever favourite beau. "More than words can say."

"And he misses you," Serena told her slyly as Blair resumed her seat and Penelope took the centre of the cushion, allowing herself to be flanked on both sides. Their wide skirts overflowed, azure over flamingo over emerald. "His sister Gemma wrote me that all he does nowadays is play cards and drink beer, not wine, and go to the races with Teddy Evander."

Penelope preened. "Poor Henry."

"Poor Henry," came the echo from two sets of reddened lips.

The third parted in a little laugh, and then Penelope leaned forward to set to the job at hand. The neat puffs of feathers around her shoulders rose and rippled as she spoke. "You will never believe who has made their fortune digging oil wells with Mr Needhold, a complete social nonentity! Just last week I saw him, and recognised him immediately, though it has been two years or more since he was last seen among us. Oh –" Irreverent of everything, her knees bounced a little. "I've been so longing for someone to tell!"

"A Cutting?" guessed Serena. "A van der Leyden?"

"Better!"

"A Ladew? A Holland?"

"Better still!"

"The Almighty?" Blair guessed from the corner of her mouth, and Serena made an odd sound and bit down on her lip. Her blue eyes glowed with brilliance.

"Bass!" Penelope cried, rather aglow herself now that she had found someone to titillate with her gossip. "He's wealthier now than most of the Vanderbilts, and quite as handsome – not smiling and blue eyed like Carter or William, perhaps, but certainly attractive enough. He was most charming to Mr Needhold and myself when we – oh, but I forgot." Her dark gaze was suddenly filled to the brim with trouble. "There was something between you and the Bass boy, wasn't there?"

"Maybe on his side." The current of Blair's voice ran smoother than silk, though there was a queer dull set to her eyes. "Though I doubt we ever exchanged more than two words with each other."

'_Is that all I am to you, an accessory?_'

'_On me, you'd be so much more._'

What came next was burned into her brain: slow kisses that were like ripe plums pickled in liquor, sweet and tart and full of promise. Laughter, his heart beating against hers as they escaped the stifling rooms of society to lie beneath the stars.

The wicked shape of her mouth when he stirred her first to pain, and thence to pleasure.

"He's coming back to the city, you know," Penelope prattled on, unaware that Blair was so caught up in her own recollections as to be oblivious. "In fact, I'm surprised he isn't here already. He left California when we did, although he did say he had some business to attend to..."

Beneath the concealment of many layers of heavy silk, Serena's hand found Blair's and gripped, holding on too hard and trying to convey as much as she could through the medium of two pairs of evening gloves. The other girl's spine was ramrod straight, her profile proud, and Serena quietly thanked the Lord for Blair's propensity to steel and iron in times of crisis, instead of dissolving into tears as she herself would. With such serenity already in situ, their next move was choreographed perfection: Serena would draw Penelope aside for a quiet word about the long suffering Henry Buckland, and Blair would drift naturally towards the empty terrace and the opportunity to compose herself.

For the first time in her life, Blair turned to tobacco for genuine relief. The moonlight she had dreamed about half an hour ago – half a lifetime ago – dappled her white arms, and her fingers shook as she lit the scented Turkish cigarette and inhaled deeply. Smoke curled upwards from its shimmering orange tip, and a little ash fell to earth and was lost in the gloom. Blair stared out into the dark gardens and could see no further than her own fair hands hovering over the balustrade.

An explosion of cut flowers was artfully arranged to resemble nature an inch or so to her right, and she reached out to touch one papery stemmed bloom and ensure that it was real.

"Peonies – your favourite, as I recall."

"I prefer roses now."

"And here I thought I knew you better than I know myself."

It wasn't enough to turn and stop and stare, because he had grown older and not changed at the same time: the same sweep of dark hair back from his brow; the same cryptic, exotic black gold eyes that nobody called hazel because there was no green in them; the same elegant lines and planes to his face that spoke of quality, of a nobility that he did not possess. His father's father had worked until death in a shipyard, and now the grandson of that immigrant docker wore a snowy white skirt and equally immaculate bowtie beneath his sharp black evening dress, and he stood in the doorway like a memory made flesh.

Chuck Bass.

"Hello, Blair."

"Hello, Chuck."

The memory came closer, and she smelt that familiar scent: scotch and pomade, cigar smoke and cologne, the underlying note of male musk binding it all together and into an aroma which made her mouth dry and her tongue lie thicker than a side of beef between her teeth. He was gleaming in the moonlight as she knew she too must be, but he had grown taller, and now she was forced to stand in his shadow.

"I paid my compliments to your mother," Chuck said offhandedly. "Do you know, I think she honestly believed that banishing me from her presence would cast me straight into the bowels of Hell."

"She never banished you."

"No," he conceded. "But I don't doubt telling that me over her dead body was a nobody with no Dutch name and no old Dutch gold going to marry her daughter and that I was never to so much as look at you again amounts to pretty much the same thing."

The blood pooled in Blair's cheeks, and she longed to cool them with the back of one of her icy hands. She looked up at him, confused and made anxious by the shadows on his face; there was a flicker of uncertainty, of conflict in her expression, and Chuck pounced.

"Don't run," he growled, and her heart jumped as she did, dropping the delicately dyed cigarette. It skittered away across the tiles, and she raised her chin.

"I'm not afraid of you."

"No." He put his face close to hers, so close that he could watch her eyes catch as the next words blazed across her skin more intimately than a caress. "You're afraid of what I know, which is...let me see." It was insulting, the way he played with her, the way he pretended to think about it, and he was immature enough to enjoy it. "That Blair Waldorf is susceptible to proposals, firelight and rainstorms, and that you are definitely not the beleaguered maiden you so adore pretending to be."

Blair closed her eyes and searched for the dignity that had up until recently been smacking through her body, braced herself for the blow that she knew was coming. It was as evident to her as it was to him, but still it drove the air from her laced-in lungs like a physical blow.

"That you gave your precious, God-given virginity to me."

"So that's why you're back." Whalebone busks and steel weren't enough to create the illusion of a spine, so she held tight to her own torso and risked, "Is there no one in California you can torture?"

"Yes, but I choose you."

Perhaps this was all a dream – a terrible, forbidden dream of things she was supposed to have forgotten. Blair blinked hard, then blanched to find his face still so close to hers, too near to miss the trembling of her lips.

"Blair Waldorf," said Chuck Bass with satisfaction and scorn. "Society's darling, the belle of the ballroom...the virgin queen." His smile was a line of bared teeth, wolfish and white. "I'll call on you tomorrow, that we might discuss exactly what is owing to whom by a pretentious little princess who allowed herself to be persuaded out of love."

"It's been two years, Chuck. Time should have granted me your forgiveness."

"Forgiveness comes at the price of penitence, and I don't think you're sorry enough yet. But never fear." He traced a line across her flushed cheek, did nothing but stare as she shuddered. "You will be."

He turned then, a handsome prince with two dark faces like a theatre mask, and his footsteps echoed long after he had disappeared back through the French doors and into the crush of the ballroom, to be out of sight but never out of her mind.

There was a wreck of Blair when he was gone, her eyes glassy with heat. She sank down into the glorious layers of dress and left them to engulf her, to swallow her as the whale had swallowed Jonah. There was no longer any substance to her arms, her legs, her bound body, slimmer than a reed. She willed herself to faint, for blackness to eat away at the corners of the grand vista before her and, when it did not, pressed her cool hands against her flaming cheeks and cursed herself for ever having fallen in love with the only man in New York who could match her for sadism.

The stars above were cool and silent, and all around her, flowers rose from their planters and breathed the night air. In the velvet blackness, the peonies were brightest, best; it was their colour that Blair found so hard to forget, even after she had banished every one from her home and hacked apart her garden with a steady hand and an unsteady heart.

Two years.

'_I choose you_.'

So many petals, scattered on the ground.

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><p><em><strong>With such a tremendous response, I felt I couldn't leave you hanging. Thanks to:<strong>_ **SaturnineSunshine, ggloverxx19, Star-crossed92, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, issabell, Rf, Krazy. Once, Poinsettia, lulubelle2010, blackheart4life, abelard, Curious Blonde, QueenBee10, Lil Miss Chuckles, louboutinlove, Chuckandblair1234 _(to answer your question of what Blair was doing...hmmm, have you ever heard the phrase 'dancing with myself'?)_, Bellemme, flipped, dreamgurl, mlharper, teddy bear, jamjar, CBfanhere, lisottina81, _and_ notoutforawalk.  
><em>This story and its sequel - my first duology, psych! - are loosely based on both the Luxe novels and Jane Austen's Persuasion, so do read them if you feel so inclined (though you won't need them to understand this fic).<em>** **_The Luxe is like Gossip Girl, only Chuck is called Henry, Blair is called Diana and Serena is called Elizabeth and keeps biting her lip.  
><em>**


	3. Persephone

**2. Persephone**

Jenny Humphrey had been born far from Fifth Avenue, but she had considered it her home since she had first conceived of its virtues; she had fought hard so that every night, she might climb the servant's stairs to the attic and dream the moonlit hours away with thoughts of what her mistress would do the next day, and what she would wear, and who she would meet. Jenny wanted so badly to be part of that glittering world that it sometimes made her stomach ache, and indeed she looked the part: her eyes were fine and china blue, and her hair was blonde and would not stay beneath her cap no matter how she tried.

Now she took up a hot iron with gusto and tested it on one of her own fair strands. "It's ready, Miss."

'Miss' – Miss Blair Cornelia Waldorf – was wearing silk, a strange glossy robe that her late father had brought back from Japan, and in the morning light she was too pale. Milky veins showed at her temples.

"I'm so tired, Jenny."

"From the dancing, Miss, or from the late night?"

Blair bit her bottom lip to watch it bloom bright in the mirror, then took a seat on the gilded stool before it. "Both, I think."

She could see the lie present in her own dark eyes, but could not own to the truth even if she'd wanted to. What would she say, and to a person like Jenny in any case? The room was heated by a grand fireplace, but still Blair drew the kimono closer about her shoulders and fought off a shiver. _He_ made her blood cold, made her flesh creep. He was a creature as unlike her as it was possible to be, and she feared him down to the very tips of her toes.

Jenny set to work with the iron, twining strands of almost black hair around it and letting loose to create a profusion of curls around Blair's face. The remaining hair would be pulled back and up into a neat bun, but both maid and mistress espoused the softening effect of a coy ringlet or two. They were very nearly the same age, Jenny a petite seventeen to Blair's eighteen. Both were small, slender and beautiful, but one had all the luck – and the financial capability – of the devil.

The other had fashion journals, worn shoes and a tendency to gossip.

"Were there any suitable gentlemen there?"

"That's enough." The rebuke came caustic, but still Blair stared at her flushed lips and felt chilly in the warm room. "That's an impertinent question, and you know it."

Jenny stepped back from the vanity and made a swift curtsy of acknowledgement. "I'm sorry, Miss Waldorf."

"No, I..." _Princess_. "I wore my slippers through last night, and I was very nearly trodden on by Mr Rose, and I didn't sleep well. I'm sorry for snapping at you."

Another lie, complete with its reflection in her reflected gaze. Jenny eyed the mirror a little coldly, then returned to her work without another word. Her silence filled the air and made it prickle, drawing the eye not to the tableau of two young girls, one dark and one fair, but to the room. There was a grand window on the furthest wall with trellised roses swarming on either side of it without, and white painted bookcases within. Much of the furniture was white: white bookcases, white marble fireplace, white vanity and writing desk. There was an old armchair set at a three-quarter angle to the hearth, and only it seemed out of place; Blair had dragged it up from the study herself on the day of her father's funeral, exertion giving way to grief and tears which had bounced off the cracked brown leather. That feat of never to be repeated strength had sent her to bed for a week, and she remembered _him_ visiting her. He had spoken of his own father's death and proffered flowers like any other well-wisher, but he was nonetheless...different.

'_You won't die of this, Waldorf. I swear._'

After that, it had been up to fate to play games with them – or had Blair been foolish to think she could love where she chose at all?

_But what came of that foolishness?_ Blair asked herself, suffusing her spine with dignity and hardening her jaw. Nothing but pain for all concerned. She did adore the sort of novel in which love was pain, engendered nothing but pain, where one could die of love or the pain of love or both together; in the real world, however, pain and love meant nothing save the kind of cold which drew blood up from your insides and then promptly froze you and drained you dry.

It had drained her.

Stringing together her spirits, Blair dressed almost casually in a madder coloured shirtwaist and deep bronze skirt. Black lace lay against her throat, highlighting its pallor.

"Lovely, Miss."

"Thank you for your help, Jenny. You may go."

The maid left, but her mistress tarried to touch her own pulsing carotid, noting in the mirror where – with exact precision, with precise masochism – she had once been kissed.

The blood beneath her skin ran blue, so she could be in no doubt that it was frozen.

_**~#~**_

Serena was in the parlour, one hand on the carriage clock and the other forming a fist, her cheeks bare of rouge but flushed nevertheless. A neat line of golden tendrils bisected her forehead, and she was wearing a soft day dress of butter yellow velvet which rustled as she moved.

"B! B, thank God!"

"Were you worried?" Blair disdained the curve of Louis Quatorze chairs and settees that filled the long room, preferring to subside like a pasha into a pile of Persian style cushions in one corner, shipped from Turkey by her father in addition the room's many glowing carpets and queer ornaments. Serena too appropriated the scroll-worked and tasselled sprawl, her sunshine coloured skirts spreading all about them like a halo.

"Yes," she admitted. "I saw him follow you onto the terrace...I was worried what he might do."

"It's what he's threatening to _say_ that might be the end of me."

Serena gasped. "He wouldn't."

"I thought he wouldn't." The cushion beside Blair's left hand glistened like the guts of an orange, and she idly stroked its silky surface. "But he means to have his revenge, one way or another, and I have every faith in his ability to destroy me." Her voice lowered, and her fingers curled into fists atop the fabric as her lips curled into a sneer. "But I'll be damned if I just lie there and let him humiliate me and call me 'princess' in that wretched way of his. Charles Bass is a sickening creature, and he deserves to be exterminated."

"Sickening he might be," her friend interjected. "But that doesn't make him any less dangerous."

"I know that."

"Do you?" The look in Serena's blue eyes was steady, undaunted. "Because for all your faith in his destructive capabilities, I still believe you're thinking of the boy who used to love you, not the man of consequence he became. B –" She laid her hand gently over Blair's, both soft and white and unmistakeably of the _beau monde_. "You will be careful, won't you?"

"I'm always careful, S."

"Then why I am I not the one who has 'slighted the wrong man' and 'got herself into a world of trouble'?"

'_Don't run._'

A deep flush stained Blair's skin at the recollection, skimming over it in favour of their first 'proper' meeting, when he had found her at the opera house. Penelope had assured her that _that_ had to be learned if one was ever to derive any pleasure from the presence of a husband, and Blair had been determined to experiment...it had been their secret, like all their secrets, and now it too might come out in the wash. Hers was a fragile existence, a web of secrets and lies all balancing on the pinnacle of her purity; she felt like a top, standing on its point and terrified of tipping. She had indulged in novels and poetry and resigned herself to a loveless existence, but certainly not one lived in penitence for past misdeeds.

"Jenny?"

Serena spoke sharply, and the maid took three quick steps into the room.

"Will you be wanting tea, Miss Waldorf?"

"No." Blair was on her dignity in an instant, jarred from her thoughts, hot in the cheeks. "And don't lurk in doorways where you aren't wanted, always come in directly."

"Of course, Miss Waldorf. Miss van der Woodsen."

Both girls watched her bob and glide away, and Serena rose regretfully and shook out her skirts. She had removed her hat – a neat semicircle of embroidered white with three gold ruffles drooping over the brim – upon entry to the parlour and now appropriated it once again, continuing to watch the doorway as Blair too stood and began to assist her with the pins.

"I don't like your maid."

"Jenny? Oh, she's one of Mother's charities."

Outside in the foyer hovered that charity, back pressed to the panelling. She ran her fingertips restlessly over and over the glossy pelt of one of Blair's finest furs, her little ears pricked for scandal. Naïve as she was about who one should dine with in Paris and who one only knew when loans were required, Jenny was as a magpie when it came to gossip. Society girls stored up dirty little secrets, so why shouldn't she? While it was true she admired and, at times, even liked Blair, such knowledge of her transgressions could secure Jenny's place on the fringes of her world for many years to come. This time, frustratingly, Jenny had only caught a name – Chuck, which she supposed must be short for something, and Bass, a name she had never read in the society pages – with no whisper of what had been done to her mistress or what she now wished to do about it. It was a conundrum.

A mystery.

Jenny, however, spent her life in pursuit of butterflies, _les belles de jour_, and did not have time to dwell, instead skittering across the floor to retrieve Miss van der Woodsen's piped custard coloured coat when her two prized specimens exited the parlour. Serena coolly nodded her thanks, and Blair tucked a squiggle of hair back behind one ear and kissed her friend lightly on the cheek. They parted ways, and the majesty of the moment was not wasted on Jenny: one golden head one way and one dark the other, one exiting into the bright sunshine of the street while one carried the remnants of the night before with her, deep into the house and all the way out of sight.

Blair stepped tentatively over the conservatory's threshold where she was not supposed to be and felt the wonderful _whoosh_ behind her sternum she always associated with doing wrong. Such pleasures and trespasses were not to be trivialised, she had decided, and her need for clarity of thought would be better suited amongst all this greenery than in the parlour where society could scent her and pay calls or court. Her shoes struck the walkway with pleasing amplitude, and plant tendrils clung to her long linen skirt as she brushed by. The ceiling vaulted high above her head, some glass clear, some stained. Squares of bright colour stood out starkly against her pale skin, and she laughed like a child and raised her sleeve to the elbow: white arm, red arm, white arm, green arm. It was vulnerability, of a sort.

She should not have been vulnerable here.

She should have hidden behind all her Louis Quatorzes or taken to her bed and called for ice, and not forgotten herself long enough to drown out the sound of his footsteps on the gleaming floor.

"How did you know where to find me?"

His answer was stunningly archaic. "I could always find you in places where beauty is born and dies."

The air was balmy, almost unpleasantly so.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do." He curled his fingers around a many tongued blossom, met her gaze; crushed it. It was barbaric, and she could not take her eyes from his. "You understand flowers because you know they can't be lovely for ever, and neither can you. You'd sell your soul for the right match, be it for your mother's sake or yours."

"But not for yours."

"Very astute – but no, that's not my game." Chuck was resplendent as he caressed the broken flower head, dainty and now dead. The sunlight fell on him unbroken, catching in the molten set of his eyes, lighting all the elegance that money could bring and all that used to lie between them. "I don't want you anymore, and I can't see why anyone else would."

"Then leave."

"I would, but..."

"But?"

"But you're here."

Blair's mouth twisted, and she felt her stomach twist with it. "Spit it out," she told him. "You'll choke on your own smugness otherwise."

"As you wish." In a moment of pause, he laid his sleeve against the deeply purple petals of a black tulip, making as if to match the colours before rising to meet her ire with so little temerity that she might as well have been a flower herself. "No man loves where he's not wanted, so you'll fall for me – day by day and hour by hour, but so they all can see this time." There was no light in his look, no emotion behind the words. He spoke of love with an empty heart, and it was stunning and callous and his voice was like careless velvet. "We'll dance, we'll smile, we'll court; and if when I'm done some fool still wants you, you have my blessing to be as monotonous and birth as many heirs as you so desire."

"But you hope no one will want me."

"Yes."

"So I'll be alone."

"And tortured, preferably."

"And if I don't play along?"

"Then the world will know every inch of your body as intimately as I do."

Blair turned her cheek and forced her face into composure, but even her profile was stony. "You know nothing about me," she said, in a hateful little voice that was low and hard and colder than frost.

"How odd, when I was the one to make those pretty eyes shut."

The eyes shut, but not in pleasure this time. For all he was a few feet away, he may as well have twined his fingers into her hair and yanked her head in the direction he wanted it. Blair saw the game, knew the game to be as damning and complex as she herself could have created. Her mother would be horrified by a renewal of this acquaintance, so he would drive away her family. She would be unable to defend or explain herself to Serena, Isabel, Penelope, so he would strip her of her friends. Finally, every eligible gentleman would soon think her captivated and beyond their grasp, so her future would dissolve as quickly as the sunlight dissipated into a halo of green around the ferns.

She loathed him.

There was no word for how much she loathed him.

"Why not draw a sword and run me through?" She inquired acerbically. "Or, better still, expose me now? Why have me dance and scrape and smile for you? Unless..." Blair opened her eyes, and swallowed her foreboding to let challenge bode black in her pupils. "Unless you want more."

One corner of Chuck's mouth pulled; he did little more than bare his teeth at her inference. "You held a certain fascination when you were beautiful – delicate – and untouched. I almost hoped you would be married when I returned, out of my reach, no longer likely to risk yourself by entertaining gentlemen alone in your house." He flicked the brim of his hat in one quick movement, and the brim tilted rakishly over his right eye. "Who knew I would find you waiting for me, and just as unguarded as ever?"

"You disgust me."

"Perhaps. But you'll still play, for the simple reason that no one cares for your own skin as much as you do."

"I hate you."

"That was funny when I loved you." His fingers were stained red from spilled pollen. "Not anymore."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to: <strong>_**Bellemme, Lexi1x07, chuckandblairlove, niinjjakiitten, dreamgurl, xoxogg4lifexoxo, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, Laura, Kate2008, Maribells, blair4eva, thegoodgossipgirl, SaturnineSunshine, QueenBee10, TruC7, Star-crossed92, batgirl2992, abelard, blackheart4life, Whatevergirl1985, Lalai, Rf, CBfanhere, Lil Miss Chuckles, tinamarie333, notoutforawalk, GGfan73104, flipped, mlharper, teddy bear, louboutinlove, iloveglee123, vivalachair, lisottina81, Spiros, syatapandlisten _and_ ggloverxx19_. An additional 'God bless' if you, like me, really ought to be revising right now.  
><em>Fan Forum_ ladies and _Gossip Girlsss_ girls, you are the strawberries and crunchy granola on the yoghurt that is my life. I've got my eye on you motley crew on _Fan Forum_, though...if you wait until I've finished the _entire_ fic to review, I shall be very cross with all of you!  
><em>**


	4. The Art Of Intoxication

**3. The Art Of Intoxication**

Informal calls were nothing of the sort, and Blair abhorred them. Four hours at least and sometimes more in the very best parlour – far too rococo, with floral friezes and china shepherdesses peeking out from every alcove with empty, limpid eyes – Eleanor and her daughter would take tea with the great and the good of New York for the socially acceptable half hour, during which time comportment was next to godliness and godliness was whatever Eleanor Vervelde Waldorf wanted it to be. Blair _would_ take her tea with lemon, and she _would_ accept that invitation to dine with the Astors, and she _would_ sit up straight and hold herself cold and distant in the presence of any gentleman caller who did not reach her mother's high expectations.

A week had passed, and Blair wanted to scream. She was dressed in the palest shade of shell pink imaginable, to match the room: her bodice was striped and her sleeves were not, and a string of perfectly matched pearls rested lightly on her clavicle and took on lustre from her skin.

"And as for the water, well –" Frederick Codrose was deep in conversation with her mother about his recent trip to London, though his eyes were fixed on the curve of Blair's throat and so she made an attempt to look animated. In her head, she recited passages from Scott's _Castle Dangerous_, half for their dramatic and entertainment value, and half to remind herself that there were worse things in the world than the company of young men who wore bottle green trousers and bowlers of a similar shade.

Chuck Bass, for example.

He'd never been far from her thoughts in the seven days since their reckoning in the conservatory, and although she'd given up on spitefully attributing him with occult powers – he'd taken the servants' stairs into the house, not simply materialised as Satan seemed wont to do – Blair still felt cold at the thought of him, and wondered if he could feel her discomfort radiating across the city and into whatever cesspit he inhabited. When she tried to focus on Mr Codrose, her mind drifted; she wanted iced water, she wanted a cigarette, and most of all she wanted to forget the things she couldn't help but remember every time she heard a footfall outside her bedroom door.

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

"_Blair?_"

_She sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the sheet to her chest. Her chemise was silky and covered her from ankle to wrist, but it was still fine enough to be almost transparent over her small breasts and neat waist._

"_Who's there?_"

"_Waldorf,_"_ the voice rephrased sardonically. _"_Let me in._"

_He came every Friday night, after they had refused to talk to one another at balls and parties and receptions, when she had seen his mouth twitch across the room and averted her own eyes in case she began laughing too. He was a smuggler, a pirate: he always came armed, pockets bulging with contraband cigarettes, a hip flask of liquor and the sugar-spun dainties her mother denied her. She would pull the covers up to her chin and he would laugh at her, call her 'proper'; then he would reach out to light her cigarette, and the pad of his thumb would linger too long on her cheek, and her heart would thud and fill her ears with its echoes._

"_Scotch?_"_ Blair wrinkled her nose when her first 'ciggie' was just ashes, smoke curling in the air. _"_No._"

"_Are you afraid?_"_ Chuck knew how to tease her, had always known. His eyes slanted like a cat's, and there was always a challenge in them somewhere._

"_No!_"

_Her first sip was like wildfire, and tears sprang to her eyes. She never took a second._

_He kissed her to take the taste away._

_They did that many more times._

"Miss Waldorf?"

Blair sprang back to life with her cheeks and lips burning, so lost in the memory that her heartbeat still beat an unladylike tattoo against her wrists. "I'm so sorry, Mr Codrose, your descriptions are just so transporting!" Her fingers latched onto the pearls at her neck, as if the wealth they represented could smooth her back into sanity. "Do continue."

"Forgive me, but I must be going." A bow over her mother's hand. "Mrs Waldorf." And a look – a look which was as charged as a touch, far too familiar for mere acquaintances. "Miss Waldorf."

Eleanor's lips pursed, and her daughter put a book before her eyes and pretended to read. Blair's pulse was still erratic, her mouth still tingling in a way that had nothing to do with Frederick Codrose's presumption. It was enough to feel her mother's disapproval radiating in every direction, and it gave Blair no small amount of pleasure – for a little while, anyway. After a minute or so of staring at words which would not form lines for her, she lay down the book on the loveseat's damask cushion and folded her hands neatly. They made a slight indentation on the crêpe de Chine overlay of her skirt, but otherwise left no sign that she had ever rearranged herself or her temper at all.

After a moment, Eleanor pressed two fingers to her temple and said, "Would it be so very difficult for you to be a little kind to Mr Codrose?"

"I'm sorry, Mother." The crêpe was milky pale, translucent, and it cast shadows as it shifted. "I didn't sleep well last night."

"And is that an excuse for rudeness?"

Very gently, Blair bit down on the tip of her tongue. "No, Mother."

"And for vexing me?"

"No, Mother."

"And for forgetting that, without my guidance, you would have been lost to an entirely undesirable match years ago?"

Her teeth clenched involuntarily, and Blair tasted blood. It bloomed in her mouth with a flavour like iron, but she was oddly glad of the pain. It shook off the mist of memory, truly waking her up and demanding that everything go back into its box. "No, Mother. Of course not."

The brackets around Eleanor's mouth loosened. "You will stay here and greet anyone of consequence who comes through that door, Blair, _anyone_. I am going to lie down and have Jenny bring me a cold compress and try to think – for your sake, not for mine – how best to go about soothing Mr Codrose's undoubtedly wounded feelings." She rose in a ripple, for her skirt was in tiers of deep grey, as dour as dismal as the look on her face, and left with great solemnity. Blair practised the forbidden art of crossing her legs, and then uncrossed them. She rubbed the smooth skin of her arms. She closed her eyes, and then opened them as wide as they would go.

Restless. She was simply restless.

The book beside her was Fordyce's _Sermons to Young Women_, hardly worth the paper it was written on, and she was too restive to read in any case. She tapped her feet on the polished walnut floor, her hands on the arms of the loveseat.

She was as she had been for a week; waiting for him.

So unaware was Blair of her waiting that she lit a contraband cigarette with her face perilously close to the fire, exhaling smoke into the clean burning hearth so it might drift away up the chimney and leave her hair and hands free of taint. The end papers were left over from the night before, and were a smoky blue that seemed too cool and clarid for the ornate room with its many chiming clocks. She checked her hair in the mirror crowning the hearth, stuck the cigarette between her teeth and almost giggled. In the space of a few minutes without her mother, she had jumped from sorrow and self-reflection to almost giddiness. If she were unfettered, Blair felt sure she could fly.

"Waldorf."

She should have seen him coming this time, seen his reflection in the mirror. He looked well, and he knew he did: broad shoulders well defined in black, his waistcoat and the curl of his cravat mimicking if not quite matching her dress. She felt the change in the air that was her lightness evaporating, lost like tobacco smoke, leaving her in a rush and abandoning the Waldorfs' very best parlour to silence and static, tension humming in the air as vibrato on a string.

"Your father's study."

It was not phrased as a question, and her only answer was to follow him. He knew the way almost as well as she did, though it was a room rarely used since her father's death. Blair had encapsulated her father's spirit by taking his chair, and she needed no more of him than that – so, despite her mother's indifference, the study had been left as it was. The walls were panelled with near black mahogany until waist height, above which they were olive green leather. The chairs were upholstered similarly, the desk was the same; the air smelt faintly of cigar smoke, and she realised the reason for his choice. She was still pushing back the memories, almost denying they ever had been.

He wanted to drown her in them.

As if to reinforce her thought, he asked, "What do you remember?"

"Skating in the park. Cotillion. My father's death."

Chuck's mouth curled in response. "I wouldn't advise baiting me."

"Then I would advise phrasing your questions better."

"What you remember of _us_, then." He removed his hat, the black silk as shiny and nap free as could be, and placed it jauntily on the bust of Plato that stood on the mantel. Blair could summon no desire to laugh.

"Skating in the park," she said woodenly. "And almost going through the ice when you let go of my hands. Cotillion, before we properly knew one another. My father's death, when you brought me peonies and told me I would survive the pain. I didn't realise that was because you were rearing me as a lamb for the slaughter."

"You brought this on yourself, and you know it." He traced a line in the dust on the window sill, and Blair experienced a bizarre fit of embarrassment at poor housekeeping in a room she so seldom entered. "And to that end...I've devised a little test for you."

"You can't make me get on my knees for you," she snapped, and he chuckled.

"Not that."

"Nor on my back."

"What will it take for you to understand that your body no longer holds any attraction for me?"

"What, then?"

People sometimes wondered if Blair Waldorf was all that she seemed, for the simple reason that her eyes were large and brown and doe-like, and there was sometimes such a light in her face and lightness to her gaze that it was hard not to think her utterly naïve. Few could see the truth of it, but Chuck Bass could: Blair kept her face blank to hide the gears working behind, the cogs turning as in a clock, slipping and sliding until she had what she wanted. She knew the value of collateral, how to hurt people if needs must, and he admired her for it.

Yet he was as masked as she was, and so crossed the floor to a glass-fronted cabinet unperturbed and without expression. The bottles were clean from their seclusion and, Chuck surmised, the better for it. He removed the stopper from one decanter, and amber liquid poured in an unbroken stream from bottle to glass. He warmed the whisky between his palms, extended his arm.

"Drink it."

"Why?"

"How will I ever know how you behave in public if I can't test you in private?"

"_Why_." It ceased to be a question when her mouth declined to shape it. The words squeezed out through her gritted teeth.

"Because it's exactly what you don't want – therefore, I want it."

There was a full measure of smoky liquid in the cut crystal snifter, and Blair balked at the idea of letting even one drop of it touch her tongue. She glanced at Chuck, at his closed lip smile; there would be no mercy from that quarter. He adjusted the foppish sleeves of his fawn coloured coat, waited.

She took the glass and raised it to her lips.

Waited.

His hair was pomaded to one side, casting a shadow over one cheekbone that was absent from the other. "Drink."

Her lips parted almost of their own accord, and she gasped even as she gagged.

Even more than a handspan of height and width gained and lost between then and now hadn't changed Blair's disgust, scotch running over her tongue and burning the sides of her mouth and setting tears streaming down her face. She gulped down the first vile mouthful, and it blazed in her throat and shot her through with fever to her toes. They curled inside her black stockings, and she gasped once her mouth was empty, bending forward at the waist and choking on her own saliva. The hand holding the glass shook.

"Drink," Chuck murmured, his voice almost a purr that made her sicker than the alcohol. "Or the world will know your little secret."

Immediately defiant, Blair tossed her head, prompting a few dark curls to slide down her neck. Her eyes were brilliant, cheeks deep with colour. She drank again, another gulp to try and finish the damned thing before she lost her nerve or remembered its flavour. It rattled between her stomach and her lungs, flaming, and she was racked with coughs. The final measure, thank goodness, was the shallowest, but even that was enough to do her harm when she risked holding it in her mouth to lessen its potency. Finally she stood triumphant, her head raised on its slender swan's curve of neck, a single drop of liquor descending from the tip of her tongue over her lip.

Chuck had remained still, a study in stillness, brow smooth, but there was a sense of ferocity in his limbs as he came towards her, put out his hand. Blair held those black gold eyes with her own as his thumb swept beneath her lower lip, caressing the curve of her chin, trapping the droplet with his fingertip. There was a queer heat as he cleansed her skin, a queer coldness when the moment passed and the day was done, and she had won. She shuddered all over, down to her toes once again, and he withdrew hid fingers.

"You'll heel nicely, I think."

"Get out of my house."

"And never return?" He mocked. "And never 'make your ridiculous offices to my daughter again'?"

Blair was suddenly reminded why her blood ran cold, why she could not walk in the conservatory or look upon a peony or open her heart further than just enough to let a little light in. Daring to look Chuck in the eye was just as dangerous as ever, though there was no risk of falling; she was at the risk of pitying him.

Still, her repetition came stronger, more distinct. "Get _out_."

"There's a reception tomorrow evening," he returned, moving not an inch. "At the Needholds'. We're celebrating the success of our wells, and you and I will open the dancing."

"You mean the whole world will see us dancing first, and imagine we are all but engaged."

"You don't get nearly enough credit for your wit."

"Nor you enough censure for yours."

Chuck's voice was soft, too soft, confidential and intimate and almost directly into Blair's own mouth. It was the voice he reserved for seduction, as if he might seduce the fear out of her. "You have no idea how much pleasure watching you suffer will bring me – like watching a butterfly trapped in a cobweb. How proud you were of your wings, and now they betray you." His gaze dropped to her quivering lips. "How proud you were of being beautiful until it was no use. We're the same, you and I. Perhaps you should give into the pain and stop trying to fight it."

"I will fight until my last dying breath," she told him passionately. "Because any resemblance to you is something I would hate about myself!"

"I will meet you in the foyer," he instructed coolly, disregarding her words, the flush and slight dewing still present on her fair skin. "At eight o'clock tomorrow night, so we can go in together. Our grand entrance will be the talk of the gossip columns, and you'll squirm through it all...or will you hold your pretty face still and your shoulders haughty, and not give them a passing glance?"

"I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."

"What a pity." Plato was denuded of his hat, the table of Chuck's gloves, Blair's skirt of his proximity. "So much wasted potential."

Blair touched her mouth as his footsteps retreated, and cold blood ran hot through her fingertips.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to: <strong>_**thegoodgossipgirl, QueenBee10, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, chair4Ever, Lalai, tinamarie333, GGfan73104, Kate2008, Spiros, Bellemme, Lexi1x07, Maribells, teddy bear, I see your true colours, batgirl2992, jamieerin, notoutforawalk, TruC7, ggloverxx19, CBBW3words8letters, mlharper _and_ lisottina81.**_**  
><strong>_


	5. Dirty Money

**4. Dirty Money**

Chuck had an affinity with oil. It was crude, it was base, and yet unrefined it still managed to fetch more money by the barrel than gold. It could appear anywhere, at any time, and it had the air of risk he usually associated with roulette.

He was oil, then, too slick for the old Dutch dynasties to handle; she was a product and purveyor of their greed, their gold, disobeying his order to wait in the foyer and instead entering on the arm of a hard faced Serena van der Woodsen, who was neither gold nor oil but undeniably lovely. The colours of their dresses purred at one another, pale jade and brilliant white. Blair had dressed as a martyr – her gown was deceptively simple, so much white silk and delicate lace trim and very little else. What did not tally was her bare shoulders and its cling to her little waist, and he understood the message as clearly as if she'd shouted it: if he was forbidding others to touch her, then she would encourage them to look. Her eyes were hazy above a dainty violet fan, and there wasn't a man in the room who hadn't noticed.

Chuck met her at the door and pinched her fan shut between two fingers. "When I tell you where to be, you go there and you wait until I come for you, even if that means you wait all night."

"Your temper, Mr Bass," Serena said coolly. "It's showing."

He ignored her, holding Blair's inscrutable look for as long as it lasted. Then the shutters of her black lashes came down, and he was reminded irrevocably of her mother, a creature who considered himself too high and too fine to even look him in the eye.

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

"_Mr Bass._"

_Chuck knew that look from her daughter, that quirk at the side of her mouth, the laughter caged in those dark eyes. He knew how the expression tasted from her daughter's lips, the sweet fervency of her whispers: _'_ask her...please. For me. You will, won't you?_'

_He'd replied with his mouth on her neck, in that forbidden place between throat and shoulder, and told her that he would, and she sighed, and then laughed aloud. All the things they had promised each other were now within his reach, so close that he could smell them as well as he could the lavender water in her hair._

_All he needed was approval._

"_Mr Bass,_"_ said Eleanor Waldorf, whose eyes and mouth were warm but whose face – whose wasted beauty – was inscrutable. The skin of her cheeks was smooth, not at all flushed, and her jaw was set stiffly. _"_I thank you, on behalf of my daughter, for you offer of marriage. I would, however, like to share a few things with you before I give you my answer. One –_" _And he saw that he had lost the day, and crashed through black ice in his mind._ "_You have no substantial fortune, and no prospect of acquiring one. Two, you are of ignoble origins, and have no greater family with which to align yourself. And three, perhaps the most important of all –_" _Her lips parted in a hateful little laugh. _"_Blair is an infinitely beautiful girl, half Waldorf, half Vervelde, and could have her pick of any of New York's finest gentlemen._"

"_She chooses me._"

"_Why don't you ask her, hmmm?_"_ That painted mouth, that drawn on smile. _"_Because I think you'll be surprised at how fast she can be turned to my way of thinking_."

_He raked his hand through his hair, tugged at his collar._ "_May I see her?_"

"_Of course. But if she too rebuffs you – and believe me, she will – then over my dead body will a nobody like yourself ever pursue her, ever speak to her or ever even look at her again_."

_Chuck took the stairs two at a time, racing towards the door which he already knew was closed to him. He listed to one side, overcompensating for the ring box burning a hole in his pocket._

"_Blair?_"

_Fool._

He closed his hand over her gloved wrist too hard, and Blair squeaked in surprise. All the muscles in her arm were contracting against him, but Chuck didn't care. The moments he chose to remember were usually the bitterest pills to swallow, but here he had no access to scotch and whores and forgetfulness, and so expressed himself with a brutish physicality which had Blair tripping along in his wake. He trusted her damned survival instinct, and it did not play him false – they reached the Needholds in record time, and her smile was so wide and white and sharp that it could all have been a pretty joke.

"Blair!" Penelope beamed. Her hair rose in a grand pompadour, and she seemed to be the mouthpiece of both herself and Mr Needhold. "So lovely of you to join our little gathering."

"I wouldn't have missed it," Blair returned sweetly. She was twisting surreptitiously within his grip, and Chuck let her go rather than let the omniscient Penelope Needhold remark it and report back. "I hear Mr Bass and I are to open the dancing tonight?"

"You are _such_ a pair." Their hostess' lips, cinnabar red, curved upwards. "I was just saying to Mr Needhold as you crossed the floor how perfect a pair you seemed. There was such a sense of classical elegance, such an easy grace...I would say you had known one another your whole lives, give or take two years. It was two years, was it not?" Her dress was black taffeta, and she seemed suddenly to have the look of a very large crow. "Or was it more?"

"Only two." A heart cut ruby ring flashed on Blair's fourth finger as she laughed delicately and touched her hair. "And since it took so little time for you and Mrs Needhold to become eminently suited, who knows?"

Webster Needhold was more than triple Penelope Shafai's monetary worth, but he was also almost twice her age and double her width. Chuck knew a hit when he saw one, but he was also loathed to give Blair credit for anything. Even now, settling back into her sparring society skin, she was everything she pretended to be: sycophantic, conniving and worthless. He could see no innocence left in the girl who had kissed him so perfectly her very first time, and those two personalities had almost become two distinct people in his mind. Blair Waldorf was no longer the Blair Waldorf he had loved, and while he would never have lifted a finger against that incarnation, this Blair could be punished.

She deserved to be punished.

"My dance, Mrs Needhold," he said smoothly, before any blood could be shed.

"Of course." Her expression had become suddenly opaque. "Whenever you wish, Mr Bass."

While the waltz was losing speed in some of the 'faster' ballrooms, among blue bloods and blue collars it still reigned supreme. Blair knew the steps almost as well as she knew how to walk, and was surprised when she faltered. There was a roughness in the way their hands met, a friction, and she knew he was still smarting – still angry, still expectant, still bruised – and incapable of making terms with her. If only he would cool enough to see that _she_ was not the unreasonable one; Blair had hidden her fear behind a veneer which was far more like steel plates than gauzy human virtue, but still it curdled, making her vulnerable and, by turns, reckless.

She would fight tonight.

They moved together, as distant and formal as could be, Chuck watching Blair and Blair watching the ranks of guests fall in around them.

"Perhaps you can join the ranks of the Mrs Vanderbilts, or become a younger Mrs Astor," he remarked, following the shape of her face and appearing nonplussed by its symmetry. "I'm sure neither of those are names your mother would object to."

"That's not what bothers you."

"No?"

"No." Her brilliantly painted mouth pursed, scarlet like a ripe strawberry, and her words too felt scarlet against all this stifling civility. "What bothers you is that you still want me. Why go to so much effort otherwise? You have enough money and prestige now to do and have whoever you desire – and yet you come back to a place which is barely done with scorning you. For all your pretty speeches..." Blair bit down on her bottom lip, distorting its curve. "You still want me."

"I want to ruin you," he told her softly, gentle enough to be deadly. "There's a difference."

"Oh, Chuck." That smile, her mother's smile. "It was a game. You said some sweet things to me and I said them back, and then we had a little fun and then it finished. I was sixteen years old, and you were exciting." Her eyes met his, laughter still caged within them, scorn still making her bold. "You have nothing on me. Move on."

"You have two birthmarks."

She blinked. "So?"

"There's one on the inside of your left arm –"

"Which you could see if I so much as rolled down my glove!"

"And one on your lower back, almost exactly where your waist ends. Artistically positioned."

"So?" Blair repeated, but her voice was a little less steady.

Chuck put his face very close to hers, felt her attempt to withdraw and enjoyed it, relished the fresh flare of fear breaking across her features. "Have you forgotten so easily? I know what they taste like. I know what _you_ taste like."

"No," she murmured, but he was still speaking, albeit in tones which would be inaudible to even the closest of the couples now joining them on the dance floor.

"Don't you remember, Blair? Your mother turned your head and changed your mind for you, and you told me I should leave gracefully: like a knight errant from one of those damned romances you read. So I got down on my knees –"

"Stop it."

"And I told you I had no poetry to persuade you with, and you asked me what I did have."

"Don't." She bit her lip again, this time harder, though all the skin surrounding it was now pinched and white. Oh, she remembered: the glide of his hand up her thigh, higher until she gasped, a kiss so unchaste and illicit that it had elicited cries from her, from her mouth, from her whole body. She remembered lips, tongue, teeth; she remembered gripping the windowsill and feeling him smile against her, so satisfied with his own ability that she had curled up inside and gone black, and the world had gone black, and then she had felt the bearskin hearth rug beneath her and she was begging and it had begun all over again. "You can't," she breathed. "You wouldn't do that to me."

At once Blair was struggling for breath, Chuck's grip on her cinched in waist unbearably tight. He seemed on the verge of tearing her in half, and leaned still closer, nose to nose, and hissed, "I can and I would, and I only ask if you remember because I remember, and I've remembered every day for two years. For every misstep and every slight, you were all I could see, or think of, or _breathe_, so yes, I'm here to torture you, because I want you to suffer as I have." Her perfume was potent at this proximity, bespoke like everything in her life always had been. "Game's not over until I say it is. Now dance."

She clutched tighter to his shoulder and turned her head to the onlookers once again, staring blankly through their ranks with her heart full of blackest terror and her stomach full of icy butterflies. He had her snared, and there was no use in suing for peace, pleading for clemency. All Blair could hope for was to keep her head above the water, and to ride out her punishment with as much grace as any lady possibly could.

_But you're not a lady_, she thought to herself. Her mind drifted back to that one night of driving rain and stealing heat, and she shuddered all over and sharply back into the present.

Elsewhere in the ballroom of the Needhold residence – which its owner's mother gauchely referred to as a 'palazzo' – Eleanor Waldorf was observing events with hooded eyes. Blair was a fool, had always been a fool, and now seemed to have reunited with an even greater fool than herself simply to ruin them both. She could no longer be bothered to care what Louisa Gansevoort was saying, nor even to appear as if she did. Her fan danced back and forth, but other than that she remained as cold and immobile as a statue. For her, the rest of the night no longer existed.

There would be a reckoning with her daughter.

The Waldorfs' second best brougham arrived to take the ladies home at an hour that was clearly too soon for Blair's partner, who had hardly let her out of his sight the entire evening. There was a queer tension there, Eleanor noticed, something that was not quite attraction, but certainly encroached upon its territory. They two were putting on a show, but for the sake of whom, she did not know. The coachman handed her in, and she refused to let her spine slump against the red leather seat or to speak until they were on their way, rattling along the short distance down the avenue.

"Until now, I wasn't of the opinion that you were stupid enough to make the same mistake twice."

Blair kept her gaze fixed on her iridescent lap. "Mr Bass was being a little kind to me, Mother, that's all."

"'A little kind' almost had you married and buried two years ago, as I recall." She glared down the slope of her aristocratic nose, not so much at her daughter as at her sentiments. "So Charles Bass has grown far richer and a little more handsome, so what? You have a pedigree dating back to kings and emperors, Blair, and what does he have? Ironmongers? Dockers? New money greasing his way into society?"

"You said it would do me good to associate with Mr Needhold and his associates."

"Not associates who follow your scent like a wolf!"

"I'm sorry, Mother." She did not raise her head, only the collar of her cloak, turning its velvet against her throat as though she were chilled. "But as strange as it may seem, I am less inclined and more ordered to play this round with Mr Bass. There are things, things that he knows...things that could get out."

Now Eleanor did slump, her jaw slack for a moment before she pulled herself together and pressed her palms to her eyes. "You foolish, foolish girl."

"Mama, I –" The endearment died on Blair's lips. It had been a long time since her mother was 'Mama'. "Forgive me the actions of a child, a child who didn't know her mind as well as you did." She reached forward, grasping Eleanor's wrists and appalling her with the inappropriate display. She shook off her daughter's touch, but Blair continued, "I know you were right now, more than ever. But you must trust me, as a person whose only goal is to make you proud of me. Let me dance to Chuck Bass' tune, no matter how much shame it causes you. When he is done, he will let me go, and then it will be as if none of this had been." Her voice was strained. "Mother, please!"

The last lady – or so it seemed – in New York closed her eyes for a long, long time, and her daughter's desperate face swam even before her mind's eye. Then she drew back her palm, and slapped Blair smartly across the cheek.

"I wash my hands of you," she said coldly. "As long as you follow this course, you neither have my support, nor my affection. I am going to Paris until this...this _mess_ is over, and then I will return to see my daughter respectably married to a man of circumstance. Oh, Blair –" And suddenly tender, she stroked the skin that was striped red from her fingers. "Don't you see that I want what's best for you? That I always have? I school you that you might learn, and make the very best of yourself. You won't let me down, will you?"

But Blair had been hardened by the blow, by her mother's capricious emotions, and so looked out of the window as the brougham drew up before their house. Stars were glittering somewhere above her, but she could not feel their light tonight. She had relived a dream in the form of a nightmare, and now her own mother did not her love her well enough to stay.

_S,_

_Call on me tomorrow for a very important mission._

_I won't let him make a fool of me again._

– _B_

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to: <strong>_**Kate2008, Star-crossed92, TruC7, Laura, QueenBee10, Trosev, notoutforawalk, Weblowsprite, Noire Ballerina, dreamgurl, mlharper, MegamiTenchi, blair4eva, tinamarie333, Chair forever, nonnie3201, D, nairforthewin, thegoodgossipgirl, Bellemme, Lexi1x07, ggloverxx19, CBfanhere, Arazadia, Lil Miss Chuckles, LeftWriter224, Nikki999, abelard, Maribells _and_ fiction by cereza.  
><em>Questions? Comments? Want to heft something heavy at Chuck's head? You know what to do!<em>  
><strong>


	6. Princess Charming

**5. Princess Charming**

_...the recently returned Mr Bass opened the dancing with our own lovely Miss Waldorf, and the pair were thereafter inseparable for the remainder of the evening. If courtship is not on the cards for this delightful duo, there will be many young ladies and gentlemen now out of pocket..._  
>– 'Gamesome Gallant' column, New York Standard.<p>

"Who in the world is this Gallant anyway?"

"A gentleman by the name of Asher Hornsby; he went to school with your cousin, I believe." The parlour was half-filled with late morning sunshine, splashing the low Moroccan coffee table and the sweet Turkish coffee upon it. "Although a true gentleman would never make his way in the world by selling society's doings."

"So you've never sold him secrets?"

"Never my own..."

Serena laughed, a gay golden sound, but Blair was looking at the shading of ink on her fingers and said nothing. She was situated on the floor, seemingly rising from a fountain of Art Nouveau black patterned skirts stitched over apricot. Her body best resembled a darkened sunrise, but her face was tense: brows drawn together, gaze intent, mouth puckered until it was as small and round as a plum. There was a neat crease precisely between her eyes.

The day had dawned pearly pink and white in the west, and for once a socialite had been awake to see it. Serena had arrived the Waldorf mansion at a thoroughly unsuitable, almost ungodly hour to drag her friend from her bed and set to work scheming. They had indulged in croissants and coffee – that is to say that Serena had enjoyed both, the former with jam and the latter with cream and sugar, and Blair had sipped black coffee and scowled throughout – before moving to the parlour where yet more coffee had been brewed, more debate engaged in and dismissed and more sweet almond oil rubbed into Blair's temples than it seemed possible for one variety of nut to produce. She was not at all content with the plot that had been cooked up to defend her honour, but had grudgingly agreed that one could catch more 'high-handed, blackmailing, shameless' flies with honey than with vinegar. Nevertheless, she was jittery, and Serena was blithe, and both were counting down the hours until they could put their machinations into action.

On an impulse, Serena rubbed a little of the oil she had been trying to defuse Blair's temper with into her lower lip; her friend's mouth glowed, and for a moment she smiled and glowed with it.

_Vanderbeck Residence, Gramercy Park  
>1897<em>

_Carter was at once a Vanderbilt, a Vanderbeck and a Baizen, and therefore her seventh or eighth cousin, but Serena liked him all the same. She liked the way his mouth moved against hers when her back was against the gallery wall, the way his blue eyes were hot and cold and the way he whispered in her ear how best to cheat at cards._

_She wasn't going to marry him, but he'd do._

"_Listen._"

"_What?_"

_His forehead was very nearly touching hers, and she giggled. _"_Shhh!_"

_They followed the line of the panelling to a corner, to a doorframe in contrasting white wood. Beyond it lay a lesser music room, walls upholstered in gauche gold brocade, sparsely furnished and disused – except it wasn't. Little Blair Waldorf wasn't little anymore, and her back was to the door and her fingers ran over the piano keys and then over the other pair of hands beside hers. She moved him, black, white, black, white; he turned to face her profile and Serena saw the Bass boy's chin gently strike her jaw._

"_Play the chord,_"_ she murmured. _"_And don't make your hand so stiff this time._"

_His nose wandered across her skin, and Blair drew in her breath._

"_What game is Waldorf playing?_"_ Carter whispered, though he was already twisting up loose tendrils of his companion's hair, attention clearly elsewhere._

"_Hush,_" _Serena admonished, smiling in spite of herself and silently pressing her palms together._ "_I think she's falling in love._"

Now she watched that same girl press those same fingers to her shining mouth with the hard gloss of mica in her eyes, and wondered if Chuck Bass' propensity to punishment had been evident even then, if she'd perhaps just missed it. In her heart of hearts – and with so many chaste but charming lovers behind her – she didn't believe that Blair's erstwhile amore had returned to settle the score. If he truly wanted to cause her pain, he would have revealed what he knew and watched her destruction from afar, not played the long game in the hope of something more. His actions spoke to Serena of a sense of possession; he'd come to get something back, and she would bet her not insubstantial fortune that she knew what it was.

If so, he was being a damned fool in his manner of pursuing it.

"What are thinking?" Blair asked curiously. "You've been looking at me all this while, and with just that expression on you face."

"I was thinking that perhaps it might be easier to kick him in the shins and have done."

They both laughed this time, and Serena tasted victory as she heard chimes and that dratted little Jenny scurrying towards the front door. She'd thought Blair's maid might flee to France with her faithless mother – strike one for Chuck – but she had stayed, appearing oddly satisfied with her mistress' disgrace and subsequent abandonment. Jenny had ever been sometimes sweet and sometimes sour.

Now she hovered in the doorway, two long strands of cornsilk hair bouncing on either side of her pretty face. "Mr Bass has presented his card."

"What does he want?"

"He won't come in, Miss Waldorf." There was a smile slanting her mouth, so perhaps she had picked up on the tension between the visitor and her employer. "He's insisting that you taking a drive with him, and there's a very fine landau waiting out in the street. Matched bays."

"What colour is it?" Blair inquired, as if it were a matter of very great import.

"Black, Miss...or very dark blue. The seats are blue velvet."

"Is the coachman well dressed?"

"Very well, Miss."

"Blair," said Serena warningly.

"Tell Mr Bass I will be with him directly." Blair ignored everything but her own voice, wiping her fingertips on a napkin and handing it to Jenny. "But have my hat and coat ready in ten minutes. It'll do him good to cool his heels a while."

The brim of a wide black hat drooped over her face, obscuring its expression. Chuck saw what he expected to see: Blair Waldorf digging in her heels and hiding her thoughts behind yet another layer of frivolity, but when she raised her face to be handed into the landau, he was immediately struck by the sincerity of her smile. It was as unfamiliar as the ice cold queen he had returned in order to seek – she had never had a propensity for openness and smiles even when she had loved him – but still he watched her, simply noting the curve of her mouth as if it were an interesting landmark on the face of a stranger.

A white gold bracelet slid up her arm as she extended it. "Chuck."

"Blair." Her name dried his mouth, sharp like lemon rind.

"Where are we driving to?"

"Just up the avenue."

The smile remained, shaded by that formidable hat. Her peach coloured skirts fanned out and overflowed the seat, and Blair's gloves were black lace and matched the overlay. The patterns shifted as the carraige began to move and she twisted her fingers, over and over, following the lines of woven flowers and ferns. "Chuck," she said again, still studying the lace. "I am...glad, I suppose, that you came to see me today."

"Really."

"Yes." Her voice was soft, the words directed towards her lap. "My behaviour towards you was inexcusable. My disregard for your feelings, my contempt for your character and position..." He saw butterflies in the pattern, and he saw butterflies in the way her hands fluttered. "I hope to atone for those indignities, if you'll let me. I don't want to fight you anymore. I want...I don't quite have words to describe what I want."

"Blair." He caught her chin between his fingers, forced her to look at him.

"Chuck," she breathed, leaning forward to close the space between them.

"Blair," he repeated, so quiet as to be inaudible.

"Yes?"

She used the same scent in her hair, even after all this time. It was one of the few things that hadn't changed, though they were inches and yet ten thousand miles apart. He experienced an inexplicable urge to push her away and flee back to California, but quashed it in favour of something far more pleasurable.

"You're a liar," Chuck whispered, and all the lines of Blair's face snapped to attention. She pulled back from his touch but he held her fast, feeling her warmth even through his hand-oiled and unspeakably fine leather gloves, quite sure she was alive but at a loss as to where the mask ended and the woman began. The Cupid's bow of her lip was perfect as it curled, as she sneered at him and prompted him to speech. "And not even a very good one. Coy and kittenish doesn't suit you, Waldorf, and it's against the rules."

"The rules," she said disgustedly. "The game."

"Your _raison d'etre_."

She flung herself back across the carriage, away from him, and he laughed at her. For all that had passed, it was still she who pouted and stamped like a child when she couldn't get her way, like a child denied dessert – and so she had been. He remembered feeding her dainties, his fingertips sliding against her tongue, and the discomfort provided by the dichotomy of that sensation and those once innocent eyes made him sick. She twisted everything, and he too was twisted because this animal still lived inside her, more savage than the girl he knew had ever been, and he could not trade one for the other. Rage warred with nostalgia in his stomach, with care, and then they curdled together and made him grimace.

"Why don't you teach your heart to feel?" Blair suggested coldly, adjusting the brim of her hat. "Surely that would be better sport than forcing me to walk on eggshells."

"Oh, I feel."

"Do you?"

"Yes." The muscles in Chuck's jaw formed a grim line. "I loved you rather desperately, you see, as much as I have the capability to love anyone. My heart, as you so kindly pointed out, is unschooled, but at the time I hoped you would accept it nonetheless. My greatest fear was that you would grow into exactly what you've become: a somebody, a something like everyone else."

"What were you hoping? That I'd remain in obscurity forever in exchange for you?"

"I was hoping I'd still recognise you, princess."

"Don't call me that!"

"Why? It's the truth." His anger turned, and he was suddenly and stunningly nonchalant. "You traded a kingdom for me, so now you'll have me in your life at the cost of your kingdom. It seems appropriate."

"Of course it does." She turned her head away to examine the world over the lip of the landau, and her profile glowed. "Of course it does to you."

"No one else matters."

"No." And then Blair was looking at him again, now that any last vestiges of calm and show and _bark_ had departed and left her all _bite_. "But don't forget that with every moment of pulling my strings, you only validate my original position: I deserve a fairytale, and you fall short. You've always failed spectacularly at being a gentleman."

Chuck snorted. "As if you've ever met a gentleman."

"Carter Baizen. Teddy Verges. Leland Beauregard. Nate –"

"All every man you've ever met wants is to make love with you, Blair. To you. To feel everything you are, and then to share it with the world. Hardly the actions of a gentleman."

"And you're any better? 'Do as I say or I'll tell the world that I' – that you –"

"Purred like a whore and died a little in my arms?"

"You begged for me," she flung back, leaning towards him once again, her chin raised and her eyes narrowed and all the hauteur in the world bracing her against him. "I can remember just as well as you can, and I remember lying in the dark while you told me you didn't care what people thought of us and what my mother did, as long as you had me. You said 'please'," Blair recalled spitefully, though her pearly fingernails were curled into claws and thence into fists. "So many times that they blurred together, and I remember feeling cold because I believed _I_ was the cruel one. How the tables turn."

The butterfly emerges.

The moth goes up in flames.

"You'll accompany me to Miss van der Woodsen's reception." Chuck felt nothing more, only the sickening sensation of imagined ash between his fingers.

"Serena doesn't want you there."

"Serena will suffer me."

"Blair! Mr Bass!"

Their tight little globe smashed, and they moved apart guiltily as if something more than words had passed between them as another landau drew alongside. This one was a deep forest green, and occupied by Isabel Coates and her latest beau, the English lord – oh, what was his name? Blair only knew that it was Hugo or Ivo or Odo or something onerous ending in 'o', as all English names seemed to nowadays. Chuck snatched up her hand, their gloves chafing together, gripping not her fingers but the circumference of her wrist. It was a restraint, but it was one that made her feel very small and very frail within his much larger grip. He caught her eye for a moment, and she understood; the back-and-forth of today had been erased.

The game was back on.

"Iz," she said warmly, listing towards the other girl half to appear pleased to see her, and half to get away from Chuck. "How are you? I do hope you'll excuse my not calling on you today." Blair tried for a blush, but only the lightest of petal hues would spill across her cheekbones. "I was otherwise engaged."

"So I see." Iz's black eyes sparkled. "You must be reacquainting Mr Bass with the town."

"Reacquainting is correct," Chuck informed her suavely, feigning surreptitiousness as he traced one neat blue line along Blair's neat blue blood's wrist. She stiffened, but said nothing. Her smile was without teeth, and without authenticity.

"Will we see you at Serena's reception? And you, sir?"

The Lord made a jovial coughing sound, and Iz answered for him. "As Serena's parties are simply the crème – other than yours, of course – I wouldn't miss it, even with the absence of your mother to temper mine. And now," she ventured slyly, her gaze swooping across Chuck and Blair's intertwined hands. "I fear we must be going. Come, milord, let us not disturb Miss Waldorf and Mr Bass any further."

"I –"

"We'll see you at the van der Woodsens'," Chuck supplied, and the other carriage pulled away. He watched it go, noting but not responding to the wriggling going on at the other end of Blair's glove. He was only dimly aware as it lost substance, and it took turning back around to realise that his adversary had been replaced by an equivalent amount of air. Her glove – her priceless, perfect black lace glove – still hung like a discarded snakeskin in his grasp, but she was marching determinedly back down the avenue towards her house with an odd little stride that was not at all ladylike and which made her buttoned boots strike the pavement in the most amusing manner.

"Where's your mother?" He bawled after her, with too much genuine interest to care about provoking her.

She didn't look back, and nor did she turn around. Her pretty skirts swerved behind her, and her pretty neck was bare. Silently, she removed the other glove, rolled it into a ball and let it fall to the ground. It lay like a dead thing, like a dry leaf, and then he knew who was blame for her mother's departure and smirked at her retreating back.

Blair Waldorf would soon be all alone in the world but for him.

What an intriguing prospect.

Chuck found himself thinking of her strangely glossy mouth, of the sweet familiar taint of her breath, and then his temper flared once again and he snapped at the driver to return to the Waldorf-Astoria, where he had lately taken a suite.

The Waldorf.

Blair Waldorf.

_You've always failed spectacularly at being a gentleman._

In spite of himself, he held her glove tightly within his fist.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Guess who finished her exams?<strong>**  
>Thanks to:<strong>_** abelard, tinamarie333, MegamiTenchi, Stella296, nonnie3201, SaturnineSunshine, nairforthewin, CBfanhere, Maribells, fiction by cereza, bla-bl-bl, thegoodgossipgirl, Spiros, PacificRomance, ChairForever, Lil Miss Chuckles, TruC7, BellaB2010, Kate2008, CBBW3words8letters, Lalai, D, QueenBee10, Arazadia, dreamgurl, LeftWriter224, H, lisottina81, Lizzie0920rb, Ioli, Bellemme, flipped, Weblowsprite, louboutinlove, DaKoTaDiArIeS, , mlharper, Peonypink _and a special thank you to _Poinsettia_, who reviewed everyday during the heaviest of my exams. Elli, you're a star!  
>I love you all. It's great to be back.<em>**


	7. Greed Is Good

**6. Greed Is Good**

In her entertaining heyday, Lily Rhodes van der Woodsen had never missed an opportunity to be the first on the dance floor, the first with a ring on her finger, the first with a golden haired delight to coo over. Nowadays, however, she was content to sit on a damask chaise and be paid court to while her daughter ran back and forth, ordering glacés, tasting champagne, poring over seating charts and pairing broken hearts with whole ones to amuse herself and her friends. Lily passed by the writing desk where Serena was still hard at work at eight in the evening and took up an elegantly engraved calling card with an inquisitive eye.

"Charles Bass, Esq. – is that what he's calling himself these days?"

Serena laid her bright head upon her hands. "Where do I put him, Mama? Blair wants him as far away from her as possible, but I worry he'll chase her all evening in that case."

"He always was sweet on her."

"And now he's sharper than a lemon."

"Oh?" Lily tilted her head to one side and considered the array of cream and ivory and ecru and magnolia oblongs spilling over her daughter's journals and ladies' magazines. "One almost pitied him as a boy, he had been brought up so badly. He sometimes even forgot which silverware to use; I remember Blair making light of it and feeding him strawberries because she knew he'd never find the fruit knife." She pursed her lips. "But she's grown harder too."

"_Mr_ Bass was never a boy," her daughter replied, still speaking into her upturned palms. "He was a man already when he and Blair knew each other, and she only sixteen. She's allowed to change. He's not."

The largest of their four parlours was being readied for guests and, glancing across the hallway, Serena could see each place being laid upon the snowy white tablecloths. A curve of red berries dusted with sugar crowned each gold-edged plate, and then stretching out like wings on either side was layer upon layer of gleaming cutlery: a fish knife, a salad fork, a caviar spoon and a runcible spoon, a charger place plate.

She smiled.

_**~#~**_

Jenny pulled hard on Blair's corset strings, almost maliciously. The required waist size was eighteen inches, but as her mistress was small and slight in any case, they could usually make fourteen without too much difficulty – on Jenny's part, at least. She took immense pleasure from planting her foot in the middle of the other girl's back and pushing, pulling back so hard that Blair had to dig her nails into the vanity and gasp for breath. Jenny always thought it added just the right touch of rose petal pink to her complexion, and was equal parts proud and jealous of the beauty she helped to create each morning.

Today was Serena's day, but still Blair needed as many eyes on her as possible. She was laced into pale gold, champagne, a light frothy cotton which foamed around her neck in a mock ascot and rippled down to the slim golden band outlining her waist. Blair caught her own eye in the mirror, and her pupils were very large and very round and very black. She tucked a stray curl behind one ear, up into the golden butterfly studding her coiffure, and its miniature wings beat in time to the movements of her fingers.

Kidskin gloves. Ruby ring.

_I was hoping I'd still recognise you, princess._

Blair breathed out harshly, and the curl escaped once again.

He was waiting for her in the parlour, pacing as if there were better sport to be had than the buying and selling of secrets. Jenny followed up with a ghost of a smile for the visitor, a deft bob and a nod; Blair said nothing, merely fixed her eyes upon his face and felt herself being assessed silently by a censorious gaze.

"Are you dressing for someone?"

"Certainly not you."

Jenny handed off her coat, and Blair slipped into it without looking away. Chuck was certainly dressed for the occasion: he wore fawn, a blander colour than her own but still impressive. They matched, she thought disgustedly; did he have spies everywhere? She reached up to rearrange her hair, and bit her lip as that one recalcitrant strand escaped her fingers.

He smiled.

She scowled.

"Can we go? Or do you plan to stand there and stare at me all day?"

"It's a pity," Chuck drawled. "It walks like a virgin, and it talks like a virgin, and yet..."

"Out, Jenny," Blair snapped. "Out."

The maid took her damned time about it too, gathering up a discarded tea tray and rolling those great blue eyes to Heaven and acting as though her mistress' mink needed smoothing. Blair could've slapped her, but she might have slapped anyone at that moment. Once the parlour door had closed, she hissed, "Are my own _servants_ not allowed to respect me? Must I be condemned by all in all that I do?"

"In a word: yes." He made neat little circles around her, moving slowly enough that every step made its own distinct sound on the floorboards.

"Can we go?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Chuck returned to his original position, lit an insouciant cigarette and sucked on the end. Smoke curled between his lips, drifting to settle on Blair's lashes and slide up her nostrils as if it too obeyed his bidding. She blinked hard, skin prickling under his scrutiny, the tip of her tongue smoothing worriedly over her bottom lip. He chose to stare at her mouth, then, and she feared to breathe for the long moments that lasted. What pleasure could he possibly derive simply from making her uncomfortable – except that _was_ how he gained his pleasure, from isolating her and then watching as she readied herself for fight or flight. Silence hung as heavily in the air as the smoke, and she wanted to glance towards the clock on the mantel and count the seconds until it was over. Except...

"You're a contradiction," he told her. "I know what you are, and yet still you carry yourself like a martyr in my presence. You seem to be deliberately trying to provoke me."

"I don't care," Blair replied. "How you feel."

"The feeling is mutual, I assure you." Chuck flicked his cigarette butt towards the hearth, nonplussed by the ash that scattered in its wake. Blair curled her lip.

"If you're quite finished defiling my home..."

"I remember this room." The tips of his gloved fingers lingered on the curve of a chaise arm, straying across the polished wood. "I remember my father taking tea with yours before he died, so I must have been very young. You were lucky to have yours for as long as you did."

She followed the line of his arm to his hand and kept her gaze doggedly fixed on the supple beige leather of his gloves. "I would rather you didn't talk about my father."

"Don't you speak about him?"

"No."

"Not to your mother?"

"No."

"Never?"

"No!" Blair pulled her coat fiercely around herself, digging her fingers in beneath her ribs so hard that it hurt. The pain was something to focus on, a pain separate and distinct from the ache that thoughts of her father always triggered. Neither the hurt nor the soft mink of the coat did anything to calm her, however, so she pulled herself up to her full height and turned away from the room, from the heat of the fire, from the wide windows exposing her to the street. "I'd prefer that you didn't mention my father, Bass. He was a kind and honourable man, and therefore as dissimilar a person from you as it is possible to be."

"Waldorf," he said quietly. "It didn't occur to me that –"

"Everything occurs to you," she returned. "And Serena's waiting."

Their ride in the barouche was silent, despite the sumptuous velvet seats and the lights and lovers of New York flashing past on either side. Blair worried her reticule, then withdrew a gilt coloured cigarette and pinched it between her teeth. She would take no comfort from the tobacco, she knew, but it was something to blow the smoke away from her and her dark thoughts along with it.

Blissfully, the ride to the van der Woodsens' was short. Fabric rasped over fabric when he handed her down from the carriage, and she threw her butt into the gutter and watched it flicker and die.

"You only used to smoke to irritate your mother," Chuck remarked. "It's a filthy habit."

"You're a filthy habit."

"Yes." He chuckled, but it was laced with darkness. "And I'd watch your tongue, princess, if I were you."

Blair drew back the hem of her skirt as if he might leave a stain, then tripped daintily up the steps to the large front door. Buckman the butler opened it smoothly, accepting Miss Waldorf's coat and hat before even glancing towards the gentleman in her wake. He was too much of a consummate professional to comment on the lady's choice of escort, but the swift up-down of his look spoke volumes. It was no wonder she fitted so well into this world, Chuck thought spitefully, where even the staff judged your every move. His survival instinct was stronger now than any pity he had felt for Blair's genuine grief for her father, and he manipulated her delicate little hand into the crook of his elbow and felt rather than saw the butler's eyebrows rise.

Good.

They processed into the reception room, where Serena was already entertaining in fine style. Flushed from the warm room, her cheekbones high and fair, she looked like a setting sun in glorious burnt orange with matching blossoms on the toes of her shoes. All around her there was noise, laughter; the settees were full, and several uproarious games of _vingt-et-un_ were running alongside one another, with players swapping or supporting as suited them. Lunch would be served in the larger parlour, on several white clothed tables Blair could spy through an open door, but for now there was gaiety enough in this small space to rouse the spirits of a defeated army.

"Blair!" The golden goddess rushed towards her friend, then pulled back when she realised she had come accompanied. "Mr Bass." She greeted Chuck with a cold incline of her head, then took Blair's free hand. "B, might you come with me a moment? I've caught my hem up, perhaps you could..."

"Of course." Blair gratefully extracted herself from Chuck's elbow and followed her friend to one corner of the room, where both made a great show of peering at the back of Serena's dress. Serena spoke first, from the corner of her mouth.

"You have to sit together at lunch."

"Why?"

"Place settings. Complications."

"What?"

"Cutlery!" Serena hissed, as if that explained everything. "He's a nobody, and I have the largest array of silverware in the house on your table!"

"You mean –"

"Yes!"

Blair's lips curved in sudden and sweet delight, and she raised one hand to hide both her expression and her next words. "Serves the Basstard right."

Her hostess gave a shriek of delighted laughter, then seized a painted glacé from a passing plate and popped it into her mouth. "Now, to business: Brody Whittaker is looking just scrumptious." Her tone now resembled a purr. "Introduce us, won't you?"

"This is your party, and still you don't know everyone here?"

Serena shrugged, utterly shameless. "So many pretty faces. So little time."

The appropriate introductions were made, and Brody Whittaker, who had very broad shoulders and quite the romantic dimple in his chin, took to the lovely Miss van der Woodsen as a duck to water. Making sure that Chuck was safely engaged in one of the games of _vingt-et-un_ – though she still strived to appear occupied every time he looked her way – Blair took a seat on the far wall and flicked at the embroidery on her skirt. One thread came loose, and she knew she looked her temper but for the moment could not be bothered to veil it. Serena was the most lackadaisical person in the world, and yet she, Blair Waldorf had been the one to make a life-altering mistake. It had hung in her life like a shadow, the recollection of this misdeed, and now that shadow had bones and flesh and harsh words and the canniest black gold eyes she had ever seen...she frowned at the image.

It was therefore to her very great surprise when Mr Edward 'Ned' Whittaker, Brody's elder brother, came and took the chair beside hers with little more than a quiet smile and nod of his head. Ned had a thatch of blonde hair and grey eyes like his brother, though his were rather larger and calmer.

They remained in silence for a time that felt like balm to Blair, and then the gentleman inquired, "Do you dance, Miss Waldorf?"

"I think you must know I do."

"Miss van der Woodsen seems in favour of any kind of diversion, and you seem to need to be diverted." He lowered his voice. "Forgive me, but I understand how demeaning having to be seen in public with a person like Charles Bass must be."

Blair let those words wash over her. "It is a charity case, naturally. He is newly returned to the city and my – my late father knew his."

Ned nodded his wonderfully acceptable blue-blooded head. "Then I doubt he will mind my asking you to dance, at any rate. Miss van der Woodsen has cleared a space; what do you say, Miss Waldorf? A country dance before we have lunch?"

"That sounds wonderful."

He extended one hand and she slipped hers into it, well aware that she was flushing and knowing that it was not the fault of any Whittaker there present. Serena broke off her conversation to follow Blair's gaze, pointing towards what everyone else in the room was gawking at too: Chuck had scraped back his chair and stood in almost the same instant that Blair had and, for all the machinations she could see and they could not, his message was still clear.

_Mine_.

"A dance, Miss van der Woodsen," Ned announced loudly, much to the delight of many around the room. "With the lovely Miss Waldorf as my partner."

Serena smiled prettily, a gleam in her eye that was just for Blair. "I heard Miss Coates expressing just such a wish earlier, Mr Whittaker, as was Miss Jones. As for myself, however..."

"I will partner you."

Half the room was looking his way anyway, but though Chuck's lips moved for Serena, he was focused upon Blair with the angle of his body, with the directness of his words thrown straight towards her. Blair saw it now, saw how she had deceived herself into thinking she could thwart him. He would partner Serena, stand opposite her in the line but for one pace. Four hands would come together in the middle of the dance, and he would reach for her fingers, stroke her wrist...then the whole room would note her flinch and see what they wanted to see, base desire amidst all this luxury.

She ground her own instep into the floor rather than charge at him.

"Mr Whittaker, forgive me, but I feel suddenly faint."

He was all concern, all chivalry. "Should you have something to eat, Miss Waldorf? Or a glass of Vichy water?"

Serena, realising all was not well, clapped her hands to draw attention. "Time for lunch, I believe."

The party processed into the parlour and found their place cards, Blair attempting to appear as weak and wan as she could possibly pretend to be. She took her seat beside the odious Bass and was joined by Isabel and her lordly beau. Iz winked, and Blair blanched for real. So quickly were people beginning to believe the picture Chuck had painted of their relationship; still, it gave her no small amount of pleasure to see him pause over the plethora of cutlery extending on either side of his plate.

The first course was a Waldorf salad, brought in specially from the hotel, and Blair demurely laid her napkin upon her lap and inquired, "Is there something wrong, Mr Bass?"

He flashed pure fire at her, black rage, the sort of snarl which left normal ladies whimpering and only prompted Blair to raise one cool brow. Oh, she felt it – how merrily he'd throttle her for poking fun of his upbringing at this table, with Isabel and Lord Hugo/Ivo/Odo looking on – and smiled genuinely with her teeth.

"Something wrong with the salad?" She pressed.

"Perhaps..." He traced a nonchalant fingertip through the swirl of mayonnaise topping crisp lettuce leaves and rosy apple, scandalising all present at the table. Then he raised it, the culinary equivalent of a _eureka!_, and dragged the condiment slowly across Blair's lower lip. "It's not sweet enough for my taste."

Blair sucked in first one breath, then another at the audacity, the lewdness of both statement and action. Her laced in ribs whooshed back into place with unexpected speed, and the mayonnaise clinging to the curve of her lip was cool and sticky. She recognised his warning, and moreover understood it: _fight back, and you'll be treated like a whore. Misbehave, and I'll tell the world that you are one._

_Kiss your social standing goodbye, Waldorf._

The tip of her tongue swept out and erased this all too decipherable missive.

"I have always preferred my food unsweetened."

_van der Woodsen Residence, Park Avenue  
>1897<em>

_Panic, sheer and blinding before her foot struck his ankle once, twice, ever so gently beneath the table._

"_Mr Bass, how droll you are! Allow me._"

_The soft press of ripe fruit against his mouth, her eyes so earnest, so rich with belief. He parted his lips to accept the strawberry, curled his tongue around it, let it dart out further to surreptitiously taste her skin._

_Her stomach lurched – that, he could see from her face._

"So I recall." Chuck selected a slice of apple from his plate, proffered it like a treat she ought to be begging for. All the sadistic joy in the world was caught up at the corners of his mouth as Blair neatly nipped the fruit in half. Her jaw worked, but otherwise her face was frozen, immobile. She seemed to be about to spit, to expel apple pulp as well as her disgust with him, but instead she stood and reached out for Serena at the next table.

"S, I am so sorry, but I feel far too unwell...would you excuse me?"

"And myself also." Chuck rose with the grace of a panther, with a tautness to his limbs that suggested he might at any moment snatch up the sick girl and carry her off.

Only Serena, who knew he was no knight errant, shot him daggers. "What kind of a gentleman would you be if you did not escort poor Blair home, after all?"

_The kind you are_, was her meaning: _no gentleman at all._

Blair made sure to keep her goodbyes brief, her voice small and her steps measured as they departed with quite as much tension as had accompanied them in. She was still radiant in her pale gold gown, but her skin was dead white instead of fresh cream and the skin of her cheeks was inexplicably flushed. She was walking in a fever dream, or so it seemed to her escort, who paused to let Buckman help him into his coat and assess the situation. It had grown cold in the grey twilight of a New York afternoon, and he fastened to coat to his throat and followed after her with not so much contempt as curiosity dogging his footsteps.

They were descending the short staircase before the house, wrought iron banister on her side when he spoke, and his voice held no inflection.

"You tried to humiliate me in there."

"_You_? You were not the one being handfed salad like an ill-bred puppy!"

"It suited your desire to be pandered to, did it not? For all your petty tricks with silverware!"

"Damn you!" Blair spat the anathema onto the air as she turned the collar of her blonde mink up against the wind. "You deserve no better, since humiliating me is what you live and breathe for!"

"Then consider this _joie de vivre_."

Reaching the street, Chuck stepped smartly into Blair's path and, without a second's hesitation, kissed her. It came so swift and so light – almost more breath than a kiss – that only the very centre of his lips brushed the same place on hers, the place where the flesh was darkest and bloomed ripest, the place whereof secrets were born or spilled. One could hardly have called it a kiss, but Chuck Bass had kissed Blair Waldorf too softly before, and it had once meant something to them both.

Now it was reduced to power play: king takes queen.

Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She curved her hand half around his throat, holding his face away from hers. The rhythm of his pulse beneath her palm was restless, unnerving; the soft flesh of her mouth felt hot and far too fragile. "Why did you just do that?"

He only smirked. "A kiss does tend to send rather the wrong impression."

"One kiss means nothing."

"One kiss means the world – to you."

Blair raised her eyes to the doorway, only to have them alight upon the startled face of Mr Ned Whittaker. He turned, and she could do nothing but close her fingers around the thought of what might have been were she not in such dire straits, had not she recently lost hope of him forever.

"You make me sick," she breathed.

Chuck laughed, and pressed his mouth to her balled fist.

* * *

><p><strong><em><strong>The historically savvy among you may have noticed my use of modern names - the Waldorf-Astoria, for example, was still the Waldorf Hotel in 1899, and Serena's end of Park Avenue was Fourth Avenue. I find it easier to stick to one name to avoid confusion (after all, you're having to get used to Chair in the nineteenth century!)<br>Thanks to: **_**blair4eva, lehayim, Curious Blonde, ggloverxx19, batgirl2992, Bellemme, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, Stella296, dreamgurl, mlharper, LeftWriter224, abelard, thegoodgossipgirl, CBfanhere, Layla Waldorf-Bass, Maribells, Kate2008,**** CBLove21,**** Poinsettia, QueenBee10, DaKoTaDiArIeS, Trosev, Nikki999, teddy bear _and_ TruC7.**_** Truly enormous love to all my Twitter girls who helped me through the crisis of this chapter!**_**_**  
><strong>_


	8. Conscription

**7. Conscription**

Her bare fingers brushed the headstone, sweeping away traces of moss and neglect. She was knee deep in dead leaves and soil was staining her black gown, but she didn't move. Once her task had been completed, she lay down the swath of lilies in her arms and sat back on her heels.

"Happy Birthday, Papa," murmured Harold Waldorf's daughter. "It's going to be a beautiful day."

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

_It was six months to the day since her father had died, and Blair howled. Her still too slender body rebounded off the white walls as she dove at them, wrenched apart books, smashed perfume bottles and shrieked. How could her mother act as if nothing had happened when all the light had gone out of Blair's world? The atlases in his study were closed and his fire was unlit, but still Blair felt Harold's presence far more than the living Eleanor's; she still wanted to tell him about her day, her silly etiquette lessons, her desires and dreams. She wanted him back so fiercely that it made her guts ache, and that was why she howled._

_Hands. Arms. He was lifting her from the floor, pinning her against his chest like a mad thing._

"_It won't help, I promise you...hush, I'm here...hush...Blair, love...love, don't cry._"

_She bawled into his shirtfront, drenching it not with ladylike tears but with great wrenching sobs that made her dizzy, dizzy enough to cling and curl her nails into his back. Then –_

"_What did you call me?_"

"_Well,_"_ he hedged, as she pulled back a little to peek up at him. _"_You can't just keep kissing me forever with no consequences, Waldorf._"_ His thumb brushed tenderly beneath her bloodshot eyes. _"_I love you, Blair,_"_ Chuck murmured. _"_And when everyone else is gone and there's not a soul left to love you, I still will._"

_She paused for a moment, then resumed her torrential tears. He tactfully stroked her hair and let her ruin his shirt before requesting a response._

"You always disapproved of etiquette," Blair reminded the gravestone softly. "But I wonder if even you would approve of me now." She sighed. "What choice do I have, Papa? He has power over me, but in such a different way to before! I would have done anything for him, and...and I didn't. I thought Mother must know me better than I knew myself, that she must be right: that we would destroy each other if we were poor and nameless, that the kinder thing was to let him go. And now he hates me, Papa." Her voice came out petulant, like a thwarted child. "And I hate him for not being who he used to be."

_**~#~**_

He was a lion in his lair, stretched before a fire in a wing-back chair with liquor bottles scattered about. Chuck's eyes were half-closed; he was considering opium already. He wanted to bleach the taste of her from his tongue, spit her out, erase her from his mind's eye and banish her. Still she lingered like a shiftless spirit, so much fire and ice and so much sadness sometimes that he burned for her, and hated her all the more for those moments of weakness. Not for the first time, he wondered what exactly was to be gained from her destruction. What indefinable thing was he seeking?

But of course, he knew – too much scotch had made him maudlin, and too much solitude had made him dull.

He was in desperate need of diversion.

"Arthur," he rasped, and the omnipresent driver/butler/valet appeared from a door deeper within the suite. Chuck relit the frazzled end of his cigarette and pulled on it, exhaling his next words along with a long blue line of smoke. "Organise a party."

"Should I invite Miss Waldorf, sir?"

He imagined Blair surrounded by men in white tie and women in next to nothing, a few clothed beauties flitting about to tempt the more discerning adventurers. His last soiree in California had better acquainted Mr Needhold with several of the Cassidy cousins, and though Chuck knew no straighter laced woman than the one awaiting him in New York, many a similarly uppish miss had lifted her skirts for the occasion and given into the vice it entailed.

Blair, backlit by the rainstorm.

Blair, lightning shading her hair black around silver shoulders.

Blair. 1897. Boneless. Lithe. Lissom. Grace as her toes curled against the muscles of his calves.

"No," Chuck said definitely. "This is not the place for her."

Because this was not the place to forget. Anger and lust had formed the potent combination that carried him to her bedroom floor in the first place, but he would gain no vindication from fucking his feelings out of her and beginning the whole twisted cycle all over again. No, Blair wanted to marry, so the greatest satisfaction would come from cutting off her routes to a happy ending. Let her feel the isolation, the hopelessness. Let her be cast down. Let her fall to pieces another time when he wasn't drunk, and stirred by the memory of her ribcage rising and falling with each quiver of breath.

He'd laid his head over her heart towards the end, pressed a kiss between her small breasts, heard the stutter in its beats.

Chuck groaned as the cigarette singed his fingers.

"Arthur?"

The man paused in his silent ministrations to the wrecked room. "Sir?"

"Only blondes."

_**~#~**_

It was indeed a beautiful day as Blair walked back through the graveyard, choosing her path carefully so as not to step over anyone's grave and offend them – she didn't need any more bad luck. The skirt of her mourning dress was slender, as had been the fashion the year her father died. It was the very same she had worn to his funeral, when she had lost her bloom and was little more than a bag of bones in bombazine. She knew the same was happening to her now, had noted the tapering of her cheeks in the mirror, the bruises beneath her eyes from too little sleep. She walked from wall to wall at night now, worrying over the days to come, worrying over the flowers he sent her every morning: peonies, always peonies. Jenny upended their vases into the street below, but still Blair watched the petals fall. They tumbled to earth like pearly raindrops, and a little of her sorrow ebbed away to be replaced by a hard, unladylike resolve.

She was going to finish him.

A footman lifted her into the landau, too dashing a vehicle for a day like today, but reminiscent enough of wild rides with her father to be comforting. Jenny was perched in the rich leather seat opposite, lashes aflutter at the extravagance.

"Oh, for God's sake." Blair, still caught between tears and tenacity, was in no mood to be tender over Jenny's star-struck response to the carriage. She peeled off her plain cotton gloves and dropped them into the maid's lap – as she did with all her castoffs, that they might be used again – and retrieved a kidskin pair from beneath the seat. "What is Serena's return message?"

Jenny was fingering the fabric of the gloves, smoothing it over her palms. She too was conflicted, but her warring emotions were gratitude and resentment. Her mistress was ever generous with her old things, but she, Jenny, had not been made for worn out slippers and thrice worn gloves! She wanted to change her pair four times a day, as Blair did, to wear a shirtwaist and a skirt when she was at home or a grand dress sewn with pearls and gold braid when she went out dancing. She wanted a house with a front door only her family could use, gentlemen to call and stare at her when they thought she wasn't looking. Finally, she wanted every one of those fine hothouse flowers Blair threw out of her bedroom window, and she wanted to wear them in her hair and be admired.

But she couldn't.

So resentment won out.

"Mr Bass is having a party," she announced sullenly. "A 'Saints and Sinners' masked party. You are not invited. Miss van der Woodsen is not invited. Mrs Needhold –"

"Is?"

"Is not. But Mr Needhold is."

"Is he?" Blair ran one fingertip back and along her lower lip as she thought, sunlight glinting off the gold buttons on her smart cropped jacket. "Then I guess from its name that it must be a gentleman's party...did Serena have any more news?"

"Miss van der Woodsen said that only ladies with blonde hair have been invited, and none whom you would respect if you knew them."

The carriage began to move, rattling out of the churchyard gates and along the street. Though they were not far from Fifth Avenue, Blair lapsed into silence with her chin planted on her hand as if she were expecting a long journey. A gentleman's party at the Waldorf-Astoria...unknown masked women...Chuck off his guard...only blondes allowed...she smirked at that. If he were balking at brunettes, at least she knew he was losing sleep over her too.

"Jenny," she said at long last, as they drew up outside the house. "How would you like to wear a pretty dress and go to a party?"

The maid's expression was answer enough.

The remainder of the day taxed all of Blair's – and Serena's – ingenuity. First they had to manoeuvre Jenny into Blair's bathtub, then scrub her skinny body. Clouds of steam rose all around, smelling of roses, and then the bath was rinsed and Blair stepped in with the innocuous smell of lavender soap perfuming her white limbs and washing away all her own bespoke scent.

Once both girls were dry, Serena set to work plucking Jenny's eyebrows, Blair to adding rouge to her cheeks and mouth and then beeswax to Jenny's to make it glossy and plump. She brushed powder over her eyebrows to lighten them and then, the holy grail of espionage, provided by Serena: a wig which itched, but which was nevertheless blonde. The girl who was no longer Blair chose black, the better to blend in, while the maid was pulled into a glossy golden gown with ruffles to plump out her flat chest and invisible panniers for her hips. Gold satin gloves reached nearly to Jenny's underarms, and her mask was lilac and crowned with feathers. Blair raised a wrought silver tracery to her face, and was gratified by Serena's nod.

"But keep your eyes down, B. The room may be full of beauties, but a blonde with eyes as dark as yours is bound to attract attention." She giggled. "You'll suck them down, and they'll never escape..."

"And me?"

They turned, both surprised by the lack of bitterness in Jenny's tone. For the first time, she sounded hopeful. She also sounded excited, afraid and appeared, by the way she was letting the dress wear her, uncomfortable in her own skin.

"Here." Blair handed her a pale yellow fan. "The men at this party aren't there to talk, but if anyone asks you a question you don't know the answer to, just put this to your mouth and giggle. Watch out for me at all times, since I will need you as a distraction – for Bass, for the guests, for the other ladies if they have brains enough to notice anyone but themselves." The look in her 'inescapable' eyes became deadly serious. "I need to get into Chuck Bass' desk, Jenny, that is why we're going tonight. He likes to break rules, and I'm sure I can find evidence of that. With the right papers or letters, I can run him out of town, and you –"

"Need never wear a corset again," Serena supplied wryly. "But Blair, I can go. I can do it."

"_I_ can go." The firmness in Jenny's voice was belied by the tremble in her chin. "_I_ can do it."

"It hardly matters that he's seen her before." Blair performed a small circle around Jenny, twirling her mask as she did so. "Since a 'true' gentleman never looks servants in the eye." She took up Jenny's hand, a queer gesture which caused them both to start. "If you must speak to me tonight, I am not Miss Waldorf. I am not even Blair." Fingers flashing, she clasped a bracelet around her maid's wrist, as if sealing her gravity with the gift. "Call me Diana."

"Diana?"

Light was beginning to drip downward in the evening sky, painting the lower horizon a fiery orange that turned Serena's hair molten. "The goddess who could best every man," she answered, with no small amount of satisfaction. "Happy hunting, B."

The party, as much as it could be called that and not an orgy, was already in full swing by the time yet another pair of masked blondes arrived. Chuck had always wondered why women travelled in pairs, but these two were clearly together only for the sake of convenience. Hair hanging loose around her shoulders, one had melted into the fray no sooner than she had crossed the threshold. The other, however, a golden blight on this damned to Hell landscape paused. They were all staring at her, those who had already sought their pleasure and were now looking for a chase. Her arms were a little too bony and she looked uncertain; he therefore made it his business to greet her personally.

"Hello, angel."

Her fan flickered open over her mouth, and she regarded him with a tremulous but haughty gaze. "Hello."

"Care to dance with a poor devil?"

"That depends on what you mean by dance."

Chuck laughed, and the lace edging of her fan receded a little, leaving a doll-like mouth bare. It was moist and pink beneath the scandalously low lighting. He took her gloved hand and raised it to his lips.

"Come into my parlour?"

"So said the spider to the fly."

"Do you plan on flying away?"

"Do you plan on weaving a web around me?"

"Do you know –" He tucked her little hand into the crook of his arm, and the crowd parted before them. "I just might."

Blair was beginning to despair of her mission before it had even begun. The door of the study was blocked by a group of boys barely older than herself, all congratulating each other on having being invited to what they referred to as a 'Lost Weekend'. Weaving back and forth in the throng in the hope of avoiding detection, far too many hands had stopped her and halted her progress. Finally, she had to take the plunge: to layer her voice sickly sweet, to sway her hips as she walked, and to go right up to the drunkest of the louts and croon, "Won't you let me by, sir?"

His arm snaked immediately around her waist. "What do you want in there, sweetheart?"

_Sweetheart_. How sickening. "I have an appointment."

"You have an appointment with me."

"Forgive me, _sir_, but I must give advantage to those who seek me out in advance."

"I'd seek you out in the dark," he offered, and the others guffawed.

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Blair focused on keeping her mask in place. "Then what forfeit must I pay to reach my destination?"

"Hmmm..." He seemed to be genuinely mulling it over. His harlequin mask was slipping down one side of his face, and his grip on Blair's waist only tightened as he slurred, "A kiss from you, the prettiest whore at the party."

The prettiest whore at the party felt a swell of pleasure that her disguise had gone over so well at the same time as the lout's breath washed over her and bile rose in her throat. She seemed to be between a rock and a hard place, but drunken demands or not, she needed to get into that study and into that desk. There didn't seem to be anything to be done, so Blair took a deep breath, pursed her lips, and kissed the boy smartly on the mouth. It wasn't completely revolting, since she kept her lips closed, but his tongue was running all over her them, and she could feel saliva clinging to her skin even as he released her. She resisted the urge to spit.

"Wonderful party," Blair cooed to no one in particular, and then slipped into the study unhindered and closed the door behind her.

Elsewhere, Jenny was feeling rather light and airy. She had had rather too much champagne, and her head was swimming in the most pleasant way, and Chuck Bass was not a cad at all but so very handsome, so very _very_ handsome in fact that she was quite happy situated on the settee beside him, and had even gone so far as to press her skirt swathed thigh up against his. She was enthralled by this place he spoke about, California, by its rattling trains, by the fountains of black oil that sprung up from the ground. She told him she would have to go someday, and ruin her dress with all that 'prospecting'.

"It is an extraordinary dress," he agreed.

"I should not tell you how long it took to get into it."

"Or to get out, I'm sure."

She giggled. Was this what debutantes did, drink champagne out of gold-rimmed glasses and chatter with gentlemen? If so, why wasn't Miss Waldorf ever happy? In the back of her mind, Jenny was aware that this was not as it should be. She could not imagine Blair doing such a thing, sitting in an empty parlour with a man, and everyone said that she was the model of propriety, the one to follow. But then, she never had any fun, was always fretting about one thing or another and pushing delicious food around her plate instead of eating it.

Jenny would show _her_ how to behave.

Starting with Chuck Bass.

"Did you return to town to see anyone in particular?" She tested.

"Only in search of a person such as yourself."

"Really." Jenny opened her fan once again, beating it gently against her flushed cheeks. The white gold bracelet Blair had so recently clasped around her wrist shone, catching her companion's eye. He extended a hand.

"Beautiful and with taste. May I?"

"Of course."

Chuck closed his hands around it, examining the delicate central diamond with the look of one who knew these things. Jenny was enjoying the warmth of his fingers and wondering if she might dare to kiss him when he twisted her arm almost hard enough to break; she was certain she heard the bones grind. The face she had considering kissing was suddenly uncomfortably close to hers, eyes narrowed, a slight roughness along his jaw that she could now see with so few degrees of separation between them.

"How pretty, pretty girl," he purred, as if they were still flirting and nothing untoward had occurred. "But that belongs to a bitch."

A paper knife had assisted Blair with the opening of the desk drawer, and she had thus far sifted through a few bonds which looked legitimate, a small black box, a wad of what Chuck must consider petty cash nowadays. His father's gold hunter-case watch she refused to touch, as pleasing to the eye and intriguing in manufacture as it was. She was beginning to consider surrender when, beneath several newspaper cuttings on the subject of stocks and shares, Blair came across a small stack of letters. They were written on tissue thin paper, bound in a neat stack with what might have been a bootlace.

After much wriggling so as not to disturb the knot, one came free from the pile. Blair had to squint at it in the dim light.

_Dear Bass,_

_I'm writing to you under the cover of writing a poem to challenge Georgina's last and I think you know I am, since you just looked over at me and winked. Will you come tonight? I do hope so. I can dance with you in public, but you have no idea how it feels when you kiss me in the dark. Even when you held my hand under the table at dinner, it made me feel sparks all up my arm._

_I'm beginning to want more from you than I should, and I know I shouldn't tell you that, but won't you come tonight all the same? I have a new novel for you to tease me about, and we can smoke and have champagne and be awfully grown up about laughing at each other._

_Most secretly,  
>Your Waldorf<em>

The sheet of notepaper, faintly smelling of rice powder, fluttered to the desk's leather top like a leaf from the frozen tree of Blair's still fingers. The words on the page blurred as she stared, tracing each letter, tracing her own feelings, her own heart poured out across the page as clearly as if every word were written in blood. She had once needed him so fiercely that she risked discovery in the middle of a dinner party, surreptitiously holding his hand and penning a letter anyone might have read over her shoulder.

"I hoped she was lying."

Not a monolith but still a head taller than her, he seemed to fill the doorway. He was still in perfect white tie, while her dress was far too low cut and glimmering like dross.

"Why," she asked quietly, something simmering beneath her tone. "Do you still have my letters?"

Chuck's face froze, and then was abruptly black with rage. He closed the space between them, moving with such speed that Blair almost tumbled backwards over the chair. He locked his hands beneath her jaw, raising her face until she was sure he was going to pull her head clean off. "What did you see? When you broke into my desk like a goddamned thief I could _shoot_ if I so chose, what did you see?"

"My letters," she repeated stubbornly. "Deeds, bonds. Why do you still have my letters?"

"Why do you care?"

"I don't."

"Good." His mouth curved up cruelly, and then he let her go. Blair swayed for a moment on the spot as, quite calmly, Chuck bade her, "Get out. I shall see you tomorrow, when we take a turn about town and reveal your lack of virtue to everyone we meet. You pushed too hard, Waldorf, so now I'm going to push back, and down shall you come, trussed up maid and all." He thrust the laced letter stack into her hand. "And take these with you. I have no use for them anymore."

_Everyone we meet_. Terror swirled within Blair, but she lifted her chin as she walked towards the door. She was shaking hard, and tears were threatening to spill, but she exited with all the quiet dignity of a queen walking to her execution. The train of her dress even dragged a little behind her like a robe of state.

The lock clicked into place, and Chuck seized the velvet covered box concealed in a corner of the open drawer and threw it at the far wall. Then he overturned the desk proper, letting its crash ring in his ears and send him reeling. His final move of the night was to seize a cracked snifter, fill it higher than scotch should ever go and drain it in one.

_I'm beginning to want more from you than I should, and I know I shouldn't tell you that_.

_Your Waldorf._

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to:<strong>_** tiff xoxo,**** abelard, teddy bear, DaKoTaDiArIeS, Trosev, Blood Red Kiss of Death, mlharper, jessie, tinamarie333, Arazadia, Nikki999, flipped, CBfanhere, Stella296, Kate2008, signaturescarf, LeftWriter224, TruC7, SaturnineSunshine, Seriouslyhappy, Bellemme, Temp02, CBLove21, MegamiTenchi, jamieerin, blair4eva, Poinsettia, ggloverxx19, KM, Lexi1x07, louboutinlove _and_ threewordseightletters.**_**  
>I post spoilers on my Tumblr for forthcoming chapters. Come along - join the smuttiness...<strong>  
><em>


	9. Where Angels Fear To Tread

**8. Where Angels Fear To Tread**

_Alcove by library, bring champagne._  
>– <em>CB<em>

_Bass,  
>Give me back my book! I don't care how you feel about the characters or content, you will return it to me this instant! You will also bring macarons.<br>Your Waldorf_

_I see we're on 'your' terms; perhaps this means you are not in fact in love with the villainously Scottish Lord Montagu from your charming little story? If not, I would be more than happy to return it. You may, however, want to restrain your sighs in my presence, lest the same thing happen again.  
>You may sigh over me at your leisure.<br>Chuck_

_Cloakroom, bring ciggies._  
>– <em>BW<em>

The fire curdled in the grate, a sickly yellow which had everything to do with the wrong kind of fuel, but seemed to Blair to be yet another sign of her forthcoming destruction. She had waked all night with the bundle of letters Chuck no longer had any use for, turning over page after page with the feeling of heaviness in her limbs, dryness in her eyes, the taste of blood flooding her tongue as she bit it over and over. These were her words, his words. These were little pieces of the start of a life together, rich in wit and naiveté and love, ridiculously simple love poured into every line and every signature: yours, mine, ours. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but no tears had been shed.

What use were her tears?

_Now I'm going to push back_.

Now he would push hard enough to break her back, the spine of whalebone and steel she had in her corset instead of a real one, instead of the one she had given up when she gave him up in the first place. Blair was well aware by now that she was spineless – after a night with her own words, their own possibilities belying every word had mother had said, she could hardly deny it – and more spineless because she would not, could not take her punishment like a lady. Her mind whirred, going over escape routes, battle plans, convincing denials. He had nothing but the truth on his side, and she her good name, but his truth was enough to finish her.

"Miss?"

The eastern sky was amber tinged as Jenny slipped through the door, still in her nightgown, still with smudges of black makeup on her eyelids. The sight of her was little enough comfort to Blair, but she tried for a smile anyway.

"It's over, Jenny," she whispered. "I lost."

The small white figure stepped further into the room, gingerly lowering herself to her knees at her mistress' side. Her blue eyes were wide and acquisitive, grasping for information as a beggar would for food. "Forgive me for asking, Miss, but was it...if everything is over, there's no harm in asking...was it...what I'm saying, Miss Waldorf, is –"

"You want to know what it was like."

"Yes."

"For me, as a girl."

"Yes."

"For my first time."

"Yes."

Blair leaned down and gripped her maid's wrist. "Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't hurt," she said fiercely. "Because it does. For the first moment, it feels like someone's cut you with a knife, like you're holding your hand in a candle flame. My mother told me that there's pain because _that_ is a place where angels fear to tread – hence why it's always devils who take a lady's virtue." She couldn't manage a true laugh, but a weak chuckle escaped her lips. "It seems apt, considering what follows. What follows, Jenny, is...it's all the feelings of loving someone coming to life around you. It's all those feelings forced upon you, into your head, into your limbs, into every beat of your heart. It's the feeling of being wrapped up in so much love that you might die of it or explode, but you wouldn't mind if you did because he loves you...he loves you so very, very much."

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

"_I love you._"

"_I love you too._"

"_Please._"

"_No._"

"_Please..._"

_She moved against him in the way she'd only just learnt to move, and Chuck groaned and pressed his face to her throat. _"_Behave._"

"_Chuck..._" _Blair stitched her fingers through his hair, made him look at her. Her pulse fluttered at even that, just his eyes meeting hers, only his were the golden brown and hot and radiating life and love as her own spilled out the same. She couldn't resist one brief kiss, one tiny pucker of her mouth on his that made him groan again and grip her waist. _"_I want you,_"_ she murmured. _"_All of you_."

"_How do you think I feel?_" _It came out as a growl. _"_You have no idea what you do; what you are. No idea._"

"_And what is that?_"

_He was close enough to kiss her again, but didn't. Their lips moved against one another as he spoke, sending shockwaves through both._

"_Almost,_" _Chuck murmured. _"_Irresistible_."

"_But?_"

"_But I'm saving you._" _His smile was suddenly guileless, as pure and perfect as an expression could be. _"_For that happy ending you're always talking about._"

"_We make our own fairytales_."

"_Not this time._"

Her memories were and would always be vivid enough to be her undoing if they were shared, but at least Blair didn't count them like cash and use them to buy an execution.

Jenny was enthralled, her oval face smooth and pallid and yet somehow savage with concentration. It took a good few beats for it to subside and then, quite coolly, she said, "I know a way to get your virginity back."

_**~#~**_

He ought to have known he was doing wrong when he couldn't meet his own eyes in the mirror.

Chuck was dressed immaculately in a dove grey suit with a jaunty square of pink emerging from his top pocket. He knew perfectly well that he looked dapper, suave, handsome; he also knew he was stepping out at dawn to prepare a star for her descent. That was why he had downed the shot of fiery clear liquor – not scotch for once, but something Russian which burned and roiled uncomfortably in his stomach – because he was really going to do this. He was really and truly going to end it all, have his retribution, achieve what he had returned to New York to achieve. It didn't matter that the city called to him because the whole damn place echoed with _her_, and there was no way he could live there and remain...undisturbed.

Blair's deceptive little maid opened the door, seemingly unsurprised to see him despite the early hour. Chuck cleared his throat.

"Is Miss Waldorf up yet?"

There was a canny smile on her pretty, bland face. "She's gone."

"Gone? Gone where?"

"You can't reveal my mistress' lack of virtue," she said with relish. "Not if she has it back."

"That's impossible," he returned coldly. "You can tell Waldorf to quit whatever game she's playing and –"

"Oh, it's not a game, Mr Bass." She came out onto the step, on a higher level and still shorter than him, corn coloured strands of hair whipping in the light morning breeze. "My father knew a lady in the Points, you see, who knew how it could be done. That's where Miss Waldorf is going."

Chuck felt the alcohol rush up from his stomach and into his throat, and he almost vomited there and then. Gripping the maid hard by the shoulders and noting absently that it was the second time in two days he was treating her thus, he shoved her back over the threshold, out of sight of the street, and then began to shake her with a ferocity and disregard for his own faultless appearance he hadn't known he possessed. He was snarling and digging his fingers into the girl's arms, and he knew that she'd bruise, but for no reason clear in his mind he was utterly focused on the words that had just come out of her mouth.

"The Five Points?" Chuck roared. "You sent Blair, who can barely lace her own boots without assistance, into the most notorious slum district in the city? Half of it's been cleared away, and the half that's left is part brothel, part bullring! Where the Hell did you send her?"

"To...an...abortionist...in Mulberry Bend..." Her teeth were rattling in her jaw. "She knows..."

"How to stitch her fucking legs together? How to gut her so she'll never carry a child? How to burn her so it looks like she's never been touched? What in God's name is wrong with you?"

Abruptly, he released her, and she staggered back and almost fell. The maid's cap tumbled to the floor as she tottered back into the entryway, and Chuck slammed the door shut himself and sprinted back down the steps. She wouldn't be so stupid; she _couldn't_ be. She couldn't think that he...but this was Blair Waldorf, and he had fallen foul of the Waldorf pride and pigheadedness at least once to date.

"Stupid little bitch!" He cursed her beneath his breath, forfeiting any composure had left and casting about for Arthur, for a carriage, and for the quickest way to the worst part of town: to a place where angels feared to tread.

_**~#~**_

The door to the abortionist's – such things were forbidden, but the inhabitants of the Five Points set no store by rules or decrees – made Blair shudder. The portal itself was normal enough, if rotting and smeared at the bottom with filth from its clientele's shoes. It was however flanked on either side by a small window, constructed entirely of red glass. She fancied that the windows themselves smelled like blood, and her heart turned over even as she knocked.

There was no description for the woman who answered but crone. She looked as if she spent the last ten years of her life being pickled, so wizened was she, and so accompanied by the stench of vinegar and spirits. Blair swiftly pulled the hood of her cloak closer about her face and retreated into its velvet darkness.

"I'm looking for help."

"Help?" The crone cocked her head like a dog. "What kind of help?"

"I was told that you can..." Blair bit her lip, but ventured on. "I was told you can restore my virginity to me. Is that true?"

She made no reply, only thrust her face forward to peer beneath the blackness of Blair's hood. Blair shrank away from the stench of her fetid breath and rotting teeth, but the abortionist seemed satisfied with whatever it was she saw.

"Come in."

The room beyond the ominous door was fairly clean, not to the standard of Fifth Avenue or even quiet Brooklyn, but a welcome change from the filthy and derelict exterior. The hearth was empty and cold, but there was a well scrubbed table with grooves running down it, as a butcher's table had for draining the blood off meat. The one chair was assumed by the crone herself, and she extracted a pipe from the pocket of her grey apron and tucked it between the stumps of her teeth. After much tamping down of the tobacco in the bowl, lighting, re-lighting and wheezing, she sat back and gave Blair her full attention. "So you'd like to have your virtue back, am I right? Let me see..." Her eyes were faded, but had once been green, and they flickered up and down Blair's idiosyncratic cloak and the hint of fine shirtwaist underneath. "You'll be a Gramercy Park girl, you."

Blair didn't bother to correct her.

"Lost what God gave you for your husband?"

"Yes."

"How many men have you had?" She sucked and spat into the hearth, and Blair shuddered and turned her face away.

"Only one."

"And how many times?"

"Once."

The abortionist barked out a laugh. "Once is all it takes, love. Was it rape?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Did you want him? Did you agree? Or did he push your knees apart and not take no for an answer?"

"I..." Blair raised her chin a fraction of an inch higher, wrapped her arms tight around herself as if to ward off the cold instead of the dread clogging her lungs and threatening to drown her. "Yes. I consented."

"Dear me, and all through fault of your own. But no matter to me." Her dratted pipe had gone out, and the process of tamping down of the tobacco and wheezing and sucking and spitting had to be repeated. "Was he large?" She asked. "How long after were you sore?"

"I have nothing to compare it to." The rustle of notes brought a gleam to the old crone's eye and silence to her sharp tongue. "I've told you there's only ever been one, and that should be enough to know what to do."

"Love." That laughter again, almost a cackle. "You're more a virgin than them that's still intact, but until I've seen exactly what your boy did, I can't tell if I need to stitch." She rose and shuffled across the floor, turned the key in the door, and then was suddenly ramrod straight as her broad, dirty palm slapped down upon the tabletop. "Up on here, if you please. Lift your skirt."

It was then that Blair realised why there were grooves in the table, why blood might need to be channelled away, and stumbled a step backwards toward the door. It was as her back hit the wood that one of the bloody panes of glass exploded, showering the room and its occupants with fragments of crimson glass. Blair felt heat spreading across her cheekbone, touched her fingers to the skin and watched as they came away red. Over her shoulder, a hand intruded through the smashed pane, turned the key, and then the door burst open hard enough to send her almost face first into the abortionist.

The light of the Points was tinged almost permanently grey from fumes, and it framed Chuck quite excellently as he stood in the doorway, knuckles smarting and face contorted. Blair was far too stunned to make a sound, trying to absorb both her cut cheek and the shock of his presence at once, and she stayed silent even as he entered and deposited a neat stack of bills on the table.

"She was never here," he told the startled crone. "You know nothing about her."

Seizing Blair's arm by way of retreat, he dragged her out of the door, past the ramshackle house she had so lately entered and down the tiny alley which ran along one side, connecting the abortionist's street with the next. Chuck's fingers twisted cruelly on the delicate flesh of her wrist, and the strength of the burn summoned tears that Blair had to bite back. She gasped aloud, but to no avail; he only released her when her back was against the dour brick of the alley wall and his face was very nearly upon hers, no more than a hairsbreadth separating them. She tilted her head as far back as she could to escape his gaze, his mouth, the brush of his cheek against hers, and her every breath came short and shallow.

Chuck ran his thumb over the gash on her cheekbone, prompting more pain as he pulled the skin taut to inspect the minuscule wound. Blair closed her eyes, not so much to revel in the contact as to make a definitive decision about where to look. He angled her face with the lightest and barest of touches, as if she were unclean, and then held her face between his palms for a long time. When she did chance a glance at him, the expression on his face was unfathomable: he appeared to be at war with two reactions and, registering her scrutiny, settled upon anger.

"You deserve to be violated," he snapped, all former care forgotten in an instant. "Or worse, you stupid little fool!"

"How dare you come here!"

"How dare _I_? How dare you even countenance such a cowardly way out!"

"I don't want you here!"

"I don't care!"

"Why did you come?" Blair shot back, slapping at his hands where they held her, thumbs resting on her temples. "If I so richly deserve all this?"

It took her a moment to realise that Chuck wasn't going to answer. His jaw worked and his gaze was averted, and Blair was so stunned as the truth of what he _wasn't_ saying dawned on her that her mouth fell open. Her cheek stung, and it seemed suddenly as if someone had given a fierce tug to her corset strings and robbed her of the faculty of speech.

"Say it," she breathed.

They both knew what she wanted: for him to call his own bluff, for all scores between them to be settled with only emotions left to sift through. He would run back to California, and things would go back to the way they were in the time after they loved but before they hated one another. Blair's eyes held such a yearning for that endgame that her whole face seemed to follow after; Chuck's roamed darkly over her features, consuming her expression and finding the one way out his pride could never countenance.

"I would never want you physically damaged," he said finally, too quietly. "It's a sin not to my taste."

The last remnants of sentiment – anger, anxiety...affection? – melted away between them like smoke caught on the wind. Blair wrapped her cloak around body and levered herself unsteadily away from the wall, sliding from the arms that held her and turning back towards what the Five Points thought of as thoroughfare.

"Thank you." The words were insincere, drifting from one corner of her mouth. "That's all I needed to hear."

_**~#~**_

Jenny was waiting, silent and shamefaced, when Blair returned and threw her cloak onto the fire without a word. She let the maid draw her a bath and then dismissed her, shutting herself in a silent world of steam and staring at her own fair limbs beneath the water rather than thinking. She methodically pulled a stiff brush across her skin, over and over until she was raw, then washed her hair through twice and still didn't feel clean. She didn't feel like herself either, not like Blair Waldorf, not even when she was dry and dressed in a clean nightgown and curled up in her father's chair before the fire. Her little feet were tucked up beneath her and she was warm almost to the point of feverish, but she felt cold and weary to the bone.

Blair no longer knew where she stood in the world. Chuck's return had forced to cross back and forth between the then and now so many more times than she had in the past two years, and what Alice found down that rabbit hole was scaring her.

Steam rose off her long dark hair, and she whispered, "I loved him. Oh God, I did."

She had known for longer than she had let herself know, and know it was confirmed beyond contestation. The letters and her confession to Jenny had been the final straw, the final blow to bring down the wall Blair had built all that time ago to protect her heart from remembering. She had loved Chuck Bass as deeply as she was capable of loving anyone, and she had betrayed him.

But what drove him now, drove him to punish and yet pursue her all the way to the Five Points, the deepest circle of Hell that New York had to offer? He had been so close to saying he would never reveal her secret in the alleyway, but his wounded male ego had won the day. She would never apologise while he still held a sword over her head, if she would apologise at all, and so the game would go on. It would never be quite the same, quite as frantic or as brutal as it had been before, but it was still a game with a winner and a loser – and Blair had no choice but to be the winner. It was a choice she made everyday she was pulled into her corset, every time she ate food she abhorred or denied herself nourishment in order to fit into a ball gown. Blair Waldorf was a winner, and this kind of game could have no stalemate.

But he would block her quest for a good match at every turn.

She would fight him, tooth and nail, hand over hand towards the pinnacle of victory.

And yet even now, he climbed faster.

Every time he caught her, held her, held her back, he climbed faster.

Blair clambered into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin and thought of white silk dresses and bridesmaids. Such things made her feel blissfully blank, so who cared if the groom's face changed every time he lifted her veil?

_How dare you even countenance such a cowardly way out!_

Because marriage to that nameless, faceless groom was the only defence against Chuck Bass that Blair Waldorf had.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Seeing as it is my eighteenth birthday on the 24th, I appear to want to give you all a present (yes, I'm aware that's not how it usually works), so here is the promised two chapter update. What would I like as a present, you ask? Well, I accept cash, cheque, or direct debit...or maybe a nice review for each chapter?<br>You know you want to...**_


	10. A French Fancy

**9. A French Fancy**

He caught sight of her across the room, and scent came next: soft, too soft tonight, poised to slide beneath the senses and ensnare. Her fingers were twitching for a light, but they were not alone on the veranda; even so early in the evening, a crowd had gathered around their newly risen queen, Carter Baizen charring her dyed pink cigarette with the end of his own and Serena lifting a strand of her hair and glancing towards the onlooker with a look which could have been called poisonous. He knew better to approach when the cut on her cheekbone still burned bright, taunting and haunting him in equal measures, pearly pink beneath several layers of powder.

Fortunately, he wasn't the only one watching.

Leaning elegantly on the balustrade, Prince Louis Grimaldi had the combined advantages of both being very handsome, which was common in a prince, and very rich, which was not. He had come to New York for a taste of a land of the free where the only names that mattered were old, Dutch, and embossed on the invitations.

"Who is she?"

"Miss Blair Waldorf, from Manhattan."

Miss Blair Waldorf looked 'fresh', which was the new way of saying that she looked young and glorious and that the moonlight seemed to scatter silver across her lashes. Her dress was deceptive, masking her décolleté with a fold of spangled gauze; as the shimmer followed the line of her tiny waist, however, the glossy pink under-gown was revealed, drawing the eye back upward to where each breath swelled and then teasingly withdrew her tightly laced chest.

She was watching him too.

The rim of the champagne glass brushed Blair's lips at precisely the angle she meant it to, spilling a stream of bubbles across her tongue that set to work bursting with the butterflies in her stomach. She had positioned this tableau just so, flanked by other deities who would only brighten her own star. Serena was staring as openly at the prince's companion as Carter was staring at Serena, eliminating them from the game before one could even decide if they were knights or pawns. She, their snow white queen – thanks to the gratuitous use of rice powder to cover her still glowing cheek – stood surrounded but alone, letting her lashes droop over her night dark gaze to conceal her expression.

"Go," she breathed, and the crowd around her dispersed like magic.

Blair had fixed upon Prince Louis as a prospect the very moment she had decided to attend the consul's ball and, because she liked to be prepared, requested a guest list. He was everything a possible husband should be, by all accounts: attractive, chivalrous, polite and positively golden with wealth. The problem came in that there was no time for courting, not with the wolf still hot on the trail of her little red cloak. No, Louis would have to be seduced, and for once chivalry and politeness would be two of the most important things barring her way.

But she was done with civility for the night, through with charged glances on his part and coquettish avoidances on hers. He was going to come to her, and she was going to play him properly.

As if to emphasise her point, she mimicked his position, one elbow propped on the railing with a hand cupping her opalescent cheek. When footsteps sounded on the tiles, she cast her eyes dreamily towards the stars and breathed in slowly, filling her lungs with the intoxicating taste of triumph and the thrill of the hunt.

Across the board, the black king moved into position.

"Miss Waldorf. One hears tales of sirens, you know."

"Does one?" Blair didn't turn her head. "Well then, perhaps you should stop up your ears with something stronger than wax."

"The lady reads Seneca."

"A little."

"The original text?"

"There is nothing more pure or beautiful than Latin, don't you agree?" She smiled with half her mouth, and felt his gaze linger upon it and then upon the moonlit line of her throat, her pale arms.

"I believe there is something far more beautiful than Latin, Miss Waldorf. I also believe you set up that compliment very prettily."

"And your parry was remarkable, naturally." The spangles on her dress glittered as Blair straightened, accepting the prince's proffered hand and meeting his blue eyes with a look as seductive and smoky as she could muster. Slowly, he withdrew the cigarette from between her fingers, then dropped it to the floor where its merry little light flickered out.

"And now," said Louis Grimaldi. "There is something far purer."

"Touché."

Chuck observed silently as they slipped into the interior of the consulate, exhaling smoke in a neat cloud which utterly obscured his expression. After a long moment where his face appeared to have been carved from stone, so still was it, he flicked his own cigarette to the tiles, ground it out beneath the heel of his shoe and followed.

_Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York  
>1897<em>

"_Come back!_"

_He clutched at her sleeve, her wrist, and still she tore free from him and raced onwards. Her little bare feet slapped against the floorboards, and he couldn't help but think that she had taken her stockings off with a far more innocent intent than the one with which she ran and he chased after her. He was quite prepared to grab her, shake her, slap her, hold her still or pin her down – if only she would listen to him._

"_Blair!_"

"_No!_" _She burst into a room that was inexplicably filled with flowers, skidded behind a lily laden table to create a barrier between them. Chuck almost hurtled into it, then righted himself and glared._

"_What the Hell is wrong with you?_"

_She threw a flower at him, its petals tumbling as it flew. _"_I saw you with that...that whore!_"

"_She came to me! Blair, I don't want her!_"

"_But you don't want me!_"_ Tears were washing away her rouge and leaving her ghostly pale. _"_I keep trying and trying because I know that's what you want, and I know it's what I want, but you keep pushing me away! What's wrong with me? What don't I know?_"

"_There is nothing wrong with you._"

"_Liar!_"

"_Nothing!_"_ He roared back at her. _"_You are the most pure and perfect thing in the world! It's like you're asking me to put fingerprints all over crystal! You're asking me to give in to the thing that I want second most – because most is something else that I want from you – of all. You're trying to give me the most precious thing you have in return for what? Nothing? How in the world am I supposed to equal that?_"

_Spilled pollen stained her fingertips orange, and she reached for his hand._

Lilies were behind Blair's head as she laughed, wreathing her in a rich white tableau and contrasting too well with all the shades of her dark hair. Though she never so much as glimpsed anything further than the line of Louis' shoulders, she had her mind whirring and working on a thousand things at once: where she would take him, what she would say, how far she would go this time to get what she wanted. She noted in an absent sort of way that the last time – the first time – she had gone so far for something she wouldn't have, but that was a moral grievance that could wait until she was a princess and beyond the reach of the Bass arm.

"Your favourite flower?"

"Roses," she lied seamlessly. "I find myself entranced by tradition, don't you?"

"And yet you read Plato and Kant, and quote Seneca at me when I try to flirt. You are hardly a traditional woman, Miss Waldorf."

"I don't think you were trying to flirt."

"No?"

"You were succeeding."

He smiled, and it was a true smile: free of malice, only just touched with desire at the corners. Blair let her lips curl upward in an expression that was far more dangerous to her morality, fighting to restrain a wince as her cut stretched. She had been washing it twice daily and cleaning it after powdering besides, so it was healing cleanly, but extremes of emotion tautened the skin and made her jaw twitch with pain. Luckily, the prince seemed oblivious to anything but her fluttering lashes.

"The gardens here are lovely, the consul tells me."

"I hear the gallery's prettier." The weight of those words clogged her throat.

And then he was looking at her like they all looked at her, those hounds with their bowler hats or toppers who came to drink tea with her when really all they wanted was to see the line of her bodice up close. Every man was the same with the same choice laid before him, and in the war between chaste love and corrupting lust, lust would always emerge carrying the ace of trumps. It was exactly what she'd wanted, and still she'd hoped for better from him.

But Louis did not even raise an elegant eyebrow.

Because prince or pauper, he was no better.

"Lead the way."

_**~#~**_

A short way away, Jenny Humphrey lay still beneath the rafters. The beams in the attic hung low enough to hit a man in the head, and she often thought it beneath her dignity to sleep in a place where rules about chastity were enforced by the architecture. It seemed far too droll that Eleanor Waldorf could keep the help virtuous even when they were out of sight, yet could not control the antics of her own daughter. But then, if that daughter had been faced with Chuck Bass...Jenny rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow, nipping at it with her teeth as her stomach lurched.

She could at least claim to have been kissed. She had kissed coachmen and houseboys and, on one memorable occasion, a drunken party guest who may or may not have been an Astor. Kissing was pleasant and it made people do things for her, but Blair's charm seemed entirely rooted in the fact that she never kissed anyone – and then conversely, Chuck Bass followed her around and chased her into the slums because she'd gone further, to the brink of ruin. She still teetered there, and though she had worn a golden dress to an illicit party and been touched by _him_, Jenny still longed to push her over the edge and watch her fall.

Because now she knew what she wanted, and it was yet another thing that the lovely Miss Waldorf had.

While the brink of ruin appeared an uncomfortable place to be, there was a certain glamour to it. Ladies' maids were allowed to sit outside the windows or just beyond the veranda at balls, and Jenny could imagine herself telling the others that 'it wasn't that bad', that she 'couldn't understand what all the fuss was about'. She wanted to have some experience of it in the way that would hurt her and make her seem unskilled, and after she wanted what Blair had been given so freely and had thrown away so easily.

Jenny Humphrey wanted Chuck Bass.

She wanted to come apart in his arms as her mistress had, but everything would be different with her. He would marry her, and damn the gossips, and then take her with him to the wonderful place that was called California where they would live without the shadows of servitude or regret over their heads. He would forget everyone but her. He would love her. She would be the richest, the most beautiful, the most beloved. They would be together, and it would be supreme.

Horses clattered up and down the avenue and sleep came slowly to many of its occupants that night, but the dreams of the Waldorfs' youngest maid were vindictive and unutterably sweet.

_**~#~**_

They were kissing; he was kissing her. Her back was hard up against the portrait of someone famous or at the very least affluent, but she didn't care. Her plan was succeeding. The pieces were falling into place. His hand was on her neck and then on her waist and then her thigh, catching her just below the knee and pulling her leg up around his hip. It made her unsteady, made her sway, and that just made each and every kiss more fervent as Blair struggled to stay upright and Louis slowly encroached on the most sacred territory. There were flashes as his hand slid along her pink swathed thigh: flashes of light, flashes of memory. She could have screamed for the recollections in her head which blocked her mind's eye and made her feel cheap, made her feel dirty and sordid for seizing the day and taking what she was due. She was owed a chance for happiness. She was owed the chance to escape. She was owed the chance to feel all this again, and damn the original sin she couldn't forget.

"I hope," she sighed, midway between speech and breath. "You don't think less of me, simply because..."

"Because you feel?" Came the reply, almost infuriatingly amused. "I could never condemn a lady for feeling." He touched her face, her hair, and his blue eyes were blinding. "Especially one as exquisite as yourself."

Blair closed her eyes and let him kiss her again. It was not an objectionable experience, but it was one which made her feel very empty for no discernible reason. There was an ache beneath her ribs that was something like hunger, and though her lips moved and her lungs pushed and pulled against her stays, she could no longer feel her heart beating – but it had to be, or else she would not be still standing.

"_Elle est trop belle_," Louis murmured, and then his hands were slipping into her hair, deftly removing the pins.

"I would bow, Your Highness, but I'm afraid you'd return the nicety and drop her."

Mere feet away, the white queen felt her gorge rise.

"No..." The word was a whisper, a thread of sound, but Louis was already straightening and scowling and putting her to rights. His mouth formed a grim slash of distaste at the intruder, at his flawlessly cut suit and his pomaded hair, at his black gold cat's gaze and his casual lean to the left of the doorway.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

"I'm Chuck Bass," said Chuck Bass, quite casually. "The love of her life."

The room faded out of focus for a moment, and then Blair hissed that he was lying with her hair falling down in silky waves around her white, enraged face. Chuck advanced a few paces and smirked at Louis as Blair snarled, "I do _not_ love him. I have _never_ loved him."

"It wounds me to hear you say that," he returned, with a curl of the lip and a hand on his heart. "Truly, love of my life, it does."

"I am not your love!"

"Oh, but you are."

"Am not!"

"Are too."

"Am not!"

"Are. Were. Always will be."

Louis coughed. Blair could hardly blame him, since Chuck was faultlessly pressed and she had reeled him in like a courtesan with a game plan and now was apparently feuding with an old lover. Her eyes rushed over every part of him that would have been so wonderfully ideal: his immaculate clothing, his grace and stature, the aura of hauteur which was so alluring when attached to a prince and so galling in Chuck, the Basstard of new money, the black king standing across the board with his face betraying nothing of the soul that she still somehow knew he had. Perhaps that was why she couldn't just stick a knife in his chest, no matter how much she wanted to.

He wasn't worth Hell.

"I'm so sorry," she ground out from between her teeth. "But if you could –"

"Of course." Louis Grimaldi disappeared like an escapee from a fairytale, the prince fleeing the ball as the clock struck while the princess watched him go with her face threatening thunder.

Chuck selected a convenient pillar and lounged against it, his eyes hooded and his expression never changing. "You really know how to hurt people. I admire you for it."

"This is all your fault; I would've never needed Louis if you hadn't turned me into a social pariah in the first place!" Blair began to pace back and forth before his pillar like an angry cat, silver spangles flashing. "You make me inaccessible, you make me undesirable, and tonight you made me debase myself by throwing myself at a perfect gentleman, all in the hopes of freeing myself from you! You made me use him!"

"I didn't make you do anything," he drawled. "You were just you, and neither you nor I want you raising your skirt for the kind of 'perfect gentleman' who was ignorant enough to be rather enjoying your sacrifice. Don't you see we're the same? Stop trying to fight it."

She screeched to a halt before him, heels barely slipping on the highly polished floorboards, her blanched skin making the cut on her cheekbone stand out like a red flag to Chuck's shame. "I will fight until my last dying breath because any resemblance to you is something I would hate about myself!"

His nonchalance evaporated as Blair sneered the words, spitting them at him and watching the consequences ricochet and scatter like fireworks. Chuck seized her shoulders, the delicate bones prominent beneath a gauzy gown which only added fuel to the fire of his disdain, his disgust at her for acting the temptress, the tension that had been writhing and twisting up from his gut and throttling him all night long. They hit the panelling before he realised he was moving her, and she said nothing, only bit her lip and raised her chin and stared straight into his eyes as if she'd rather like to put a bullet between them.

He waited.

She waited.

Dozens of pairs of painted eyes glared their disapproval as Chuck moved forward with all the impetus of the freight train rattling within his ribcage, glorying as Blair's eyes shut even before his mouth was upon hers. They two closed, they shuddered, and then her tongue was sliding between his teeth and drawing him into her, into a far darker and deeper place than he was sure she had ever been with the paper doll prince. She tasted delight in the consummation of so much anticipation, so much waiting to be stabbed in the back or bent to his will against hers. Now she was bending, and it was electrifying to feel her flesh crawl and her body soften simultaneously. Her spine creased when his fingers found it and she sagged, warm and pliant and sweet beneath his touch. He inhaled flavour and fragrance and bit her, first gently, then harder, prompting gasps and tiny whimpers and returns of the atrocity. It was the same – why did she have to be the same? – and that forced rationality into his brain with the same unwelcome power as cold water in the face.

He broke the kiss.

They were both breathing hard, scorching the other's lips with every exhalation, chests rising and falling and hearts banging together. Blair burned at his audacity, at the way Chuck Bass touched her as if he had a right; he was trying to impress upon her that she was his, his possession, and would remain so no matter how many princes she kissed or courted. That presumption seemed to fill the whole gallery, to hang over their heads and spill from his palms where they gripped her waist.

"I won't be alone but for you," she vowed. "I won't have nobody to turn to but you."

"You won't even have me," he murmured, pressing the corner of his mouth to hers.

Blair shivered and shook her head. "I will find someone to love me – and no matter how hard you push, that person will never be you."

Chuck closed his eyes as her mask descended, as she pushed back against him once again and moved them to opposite sides of the board. The train in his chest stalled, and there was nothing but wilderness all around.

"I wasn't lying, you know."

"What?" She was fitting the fragments back into a whole, twisting easily from his grasp and winding up her hair into a shaky imitation of its earlier magnificence, smoothing down her dress and cooling her cheeks with the backs of her hands. Her focus was on everything but him: on her slim white arms, on her unsteady fingers, on the embroidery on her gown that still needed to be rearranged.

"Thus far, I have only expended so much energy on one woman: you. Since the rest charge by the hour or are more than happy to offer themselves _gratis_ for nothing more than that...you are technically the love of my life. Make of that what you will."

It took until she was back in the throng, enshrined – or possibly entombed – in the arms of Cornelius Jackson Vandergelt III for Blair to remember the only promise he'd given her that evening, one spoken so flippantly and one so disconnected from the subject of her seduction or his surrender that it had escaped her notice. She caught sight of a retreating figure over Mr Vandergelt's shoulder and knew that, to all intents and purposes, the party was over for them both.

_Are. Were. Always will be._

She laid her fingers on her lips and shivered.

* * *

><p><em><strong>...and now we return to our scheduled programming. Thanks to: <strong>_**threewordseightletters, blair4eva, Laura, signaturescarf, dreamgurl, Curious Blonde, DaKoTaDiArIeS, Star-crossed92, LeftWriter224, CBfanhere, IndigoandViolet, ggloverxx19, teddy bear, Krism, katharienne, Trosev, Kate2008, flipped, MegamiTenchi, Tru7, Arazadia, SaturnineSunshine, UPDATE ASAP PLEASE, ggoddess, Poinsettia, KM, Nikki999, maribells, UPDATE, Noire Ballerina, jamieerin, Temp02, UPDATE _(again!) and_ mlharper._ Big hugs to all my friends and fans on _Tumblr_,_ Twitter_,_ Gossip Girlsss_ and _Fan Forum_._**


	11. Abelard & Heloise

**10. Abelard & Heloise**

The deceptive pink dress lay on the floor, its skirts puffed like painted evening clouds. The room was still and warm, and the sleeping face – fair against a brown halo of hair but bright on the white pillow – was bare and smooth, though the lips were bitten and glittering with tiny beads of blood. She glowed with the rising sun, becoming hotter, shifting, oblivious to the scurrying maid who stared at her with a kind of patronising fascination. The girl's eyes took in a swollen mouth, a lightly flushing cheek, the flicker of movement beneath moon pale eyelids, and she silently lifted articles of clothing from the stool before the vanity and just about burned alive like a martyr to her unanswered questions.

In passing, she smoothed down the rich counterpane, its silken threads too soft and too mocking to her roughened fingers. Nevertheless, she had to be polite to get what she wanted and so descended to the bowels of the kitchen to retrieve chocolate and ice, to fill a washbasin with warm water and carry it back upstairs with her, feet placed slantwise so as not to spill a drop.

Jenny had never slept late in her life. Before her mother had left and her father and brother had decamped to Brooklyn in the hope of making a cleaner living outside service, mornings had perhaps been easier – someone to put up her hair and pour the water for her face and hands – but she had never slept until noon as almost all debutantes seemed to do. This morning, however, she was determined to have a full report of the consul's ball, and so she clattered the bowl of chocolate as she set it down.

Nothing.

She lined up the assortment of silver filigree brushes, combs and bottles, rattling and clinking each one against its fellows.

Finally, the young maid gave up on subtlety and flung open the window. The casement came apart in several pieces, and when the largest swung far enough back to strike its own frame, there was a horrible screech and a blast of air which swept through the room and whistled in the grate.

It was the cold which woke Blair, sending her deeper into the mattress. She rolled and pressed her face into the pillow, denying the morning as fervently as she could. Her toes peeped out at the foot of the bed and were quickly withdrawn as she rolled into an affronted ball and hissed, "Must you do that?"

"Your chocolate will cool, Miss," Jenny returned briskly, tying back the drapes.

"I don't want any chocolate." Blair sat up irritably when she could no longer ignore the coming day; even the creamy smell, the glossy texture of a porcelain bowlful of chocolate was enough to turn her stomach. She had barely eaten the day before and only indulged in a glass or two of champagne at the consulate, yet had ended the night bent over a basin trying desperately not to vomit. Whether it was the result of alcohol on her jangling nerves or having kissed her deadly enemy, she did not know, but had grave suspicions about the latter considering the buzzing in her ears when she thought about Chuck.

"Was it not an enjoyable evening, Miss Waldorf?"

"One half of it."

_Elle est trop belle._

_You are technically the love of my life._

"Was..." Jenny placed a cake of sharp lavender soap beside the enamel basin and pretended to busy herself with its wrappings. "Was Mr Bass there?"

"Why?"

"I was wondering if he would ask for your hand after following you to the Points."

Laughter bubbled up from Blair before she could stop it, and once she'd begun, she couldn't stop. She clutched her ribs and rocked and laughed, harder with every shudder and shake of her head. Her hair hung in long picturesque curls around her face, but her eyes were too shiny and her cheeks were too pink, and tears squeezed from the corners of her tightly closed eyes. Her fingers curled into fists and still she laughed, each trill climbing higher and higher until it was almost a shriek. Jenny's face became darker at the apparent insult, until Blair held up a hand and choked out, "Oh – not you – I'm not – not laughing – at you. It's just that he – that I –" She suddenly sobered. "Mr Bass has made it eminently clear that the only thing we share is a will to win. He and I will never, never share _those_ sorts of feelings."

"Forgive me, Miss, but you have often told me those sort of feelings are not necessary for marriage."

"But antipathy is certainly not conducive to matrimony."

"Do you dislike the gentleman?"

"Why do you ask?" A skein of dark hair rippled over one shoulder as Blair cocked her head to the side and narrowed equally dark eyes. "You think because you talked to him once, you might have a shot?"

"It's nothing like that."

"Then tell what it _is_ like."

Jenny kept her gaze cast respectfully downwards, though she felt more like glaring or swearing straight into Blair's perfect china doll face. "Mr Bass was kind to me at his party," she replied, making sure to keep her tone low and measured. "That's what it is like. He behaved to me as a gentleman would, and I –" She raised her head with the words, and was greatly surprised by the change Blair had undergone. Whilst suspecting her maid of a crush, she had been sharp-tongued and mocking; upon the mention of gentlemanlike behaviour from her adversary, her formerly blushing cheeks had blanched and her expression had become rigid, frozen in place. Her mouth was the only part of her face left mobile, and it moved but stiffly.

"You're dismissed, Jenny."

"But I have to –"

"Get out!"

She actually threw the peonies by her bedside, threw them so hard that they struck the wall and exploded in bursts of violent, vibrant pink. Jenny darted away from the onslaught, taking the stairs two at a time and using the grand staircase for once, refusing her mistress any superiority, refusing to let her have the satisfaction of her minions disappearing behind the panelling and taking the warren of servants' stairs through the house. Her worn slippers were swallowed, veritably caressed by the Turkey carpet, but what she saw in the entryway below made her stop dead. Her heart leapt into her mouth and began to race, her palms became slick and she felt inexplicably feverish.

Chuck Bass had come calling.

"How did you get in?" Jenny demanded, too startled to curtsey and scrape.

He wore black today, the kind of soft black which made her feel very shabby indeed. His waistcoat was plum coloured and so too were the accents on his coat, and his eyes shone almost sepia as he drawled, "She'd sit in the conservatory, sometimes for hours, and I would watch. I found my way into her head about the same time as the way through the glass panel depicting Saint Jude."

"Jude?"

"Patron saint of lost causes." The corners of his mouth curved as she reached the bottom step. "Rather like yourself."

"I am not –" She began, but the trespasser wasn't interested.

"Is this what you want? To be at the princess' beck and call every hour of the night and day? To wash her things until your hands are raw? To dress her hair and powder her pretty pouting face?" He made a small circle in the air with his shiny black hat, so expensive that the silk never once napped. "Because it seems to me that an individual as resourceful as yourself, a person who infiltrated 'polite' society so easily at my party deserves more in life than to pick up after the dishonourable – and thoroughly dishonoured – Blair Waldorf." One spotless glove tilted up Jenny's chin, and a shiver of pleasure ran the length of her spine. "How strange..." He seemed abruptly far away, not looking at her but through her, past Jenny Humphrey and into the past. "You remind me of her. She was never so bloodthirsty, but you remind me of her."

"Then what do you want with me?" Jenny whispered.

Chuck came to himself abruptly, and she watched a shadow slide silently over him. "I want you to bring her down," he said simply. "I'm sick of trying myself, it just leads to...but I want you to bring her down. You want to take her crown. You know you do. You want to wear silk and satin and dance and flirt and have someone bring you ice when you've had too much champagne. You want to gorge yourself on luxury and never, ever get sick of it. You crave it. You _need_ it."

"How do you know that?"

"She –" He directed one finger and Jenny's face towards the upper floor. "Has an uncanny way of making her way the most desirable one."

Jenny trod carefully, readying herself for success and for its white hot starburst even as she breathed, "You...you want me?"

"I need you," he told her casually, as if it were inconsequential. "No one else has your skills, your knowledge of how she works and what she wants. I can get you a suite at the New Netherland hotel with your own maid, your own dresses and shoes, perhaps even put a carriage at your disposal." The word 'carriage' made her very nearly pant with avarice, and Chuck knew he had chosen well. "You learned to serve. You can learn to lead."

Her teeth were white, almost dazzlingly so, and even. They showed in a snarl when she smiled.

Blair knew something was wrong when the bells began to ring. She had not used the bell pull by her bed to summon Jenny to her side, and yet all the bells in the house seemed to be chiming, so loudly that it could have been all the bells in the world. The din pealed inside her skull as she flung back the covers and rushed from the room, flying down the staircase with her bare feet feeling very vulnerable on the polished landing and on the marble floor of the hall. The drawing room was empty, and so was her father's study. Clapping her hands over her ears, she used her elbow to push open the parlour door.

The sight that greeted her was almost enough to make her vomit afresh. In the centre of the settee, curled like a self-righteous cat sat Jenny, seemingly nonchalant as Blair stared. Chuck stood before the unlit fireplace, gloves folded in one hand, and though he was observing the hearth as if it might spontaneously light itself, his intention was entirely focused upon the door. The moment spooled out like a skein of thread between them, and Blair folded her arms over the transparent bodice of her nightgown and waited.

Eventually, he deigned to notice her.

"Morning, sunshine."

"What do you think you're doing here?"

"Waiting for you, obviously."

"Not seducing my maid?"

His eyes darted to the languorous Jenny, then back to her. "No."

"Then why does she ask so many questions about you?"

"Jenny," said Chuck lightly, brushing at an imaginary piece of lint on his sleeve. "Out."

And to Blair's very great surprise, the girl peeled herself up off the settee and swayed from the room with a swing in her hips and a spring in her step that had certainly not been there fifteen minutes earlier. She glided past her mistress without so much as a glance in her direction, closing the door behind her with a gentle click and a swift smile back over her shoulder. Blair had no doubt that she had her ear or her eye pressed to the keyhole, but that didn't irk her quite as much as Chuck Bass standing in her parlour as if he belonged there, as if he had any right to be there. The hairs on her arms rippled upright.

"How dare you disrespect the prince in such a way."

"When he works for some respect, he can have it."

"How dare you interrupt us."

"Why? Enjoying yourself, were you?"

She skated around the question, infuriated that he was so glib while on such thin ice. Her voice became cold, sharp, clear as a bell. "How dare you kiss me."

"And you weren't begging for it, of course." Chuck sauntered forward, dark in black and purple and deep in the way his eyes were snapping at her without saying a word. "Of course you would never try to get hot off a man who would bore you to tears if you actually bothered to listen to anything other than the chink of his pockets. I could make you cry, Waldorf." He traced a line down her cheek, a line where a single tear might fall if she felt strongly enough to shed it. "I could make you beg me to make you cry just a little longer."

Blair slapped him clean across the face and, when he only smirked, struck the other cheek too. She was quivering with ire, Dutch doll spots of colour high on her cheekbones, lips tightly compressed and white. Her blood was fizzing and whirring in her temples, and even her eyeballs seemed hot; she raised her hand to slap him again, but Chuck forestalled her in the queerest manner imaginable. Catching her hand as she swung it back, he smoothed out the tingling palm and brought it to his lips. His kiss was cool, careful on the stinging flesh as Blair stared at him in stark astonishment, and then he folded her fingers over it and straightened. As her fingertips made contact with her palm, something – something hot and white and undeniable – leapt up her arm, arcing back on itself to escape her skin and enter his. Blair gasped, and Chuck watched her lips part and her pupils dilate and only became more inscrutable himself.

When he did speak, his tone was unexpectedly soft. "Did you –"

"No." She snatched back her hand. "I felt nothing. I _feel_ nothing."

"You sure?"

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

"_You sure?_"

_Was she awake, still? Her knees had given out and the room was spinning and flames were licking her limbs but she wanted more, needed more, had to knot her fingers in his hair and let him kiss her until her lungs were burning and her heart was pounding and she could only speak in a whisper. She had to be awake if she could feel this much. She had to be alive if she needed him so badly, so desperately, so irrationally that she could feel her heart beating in her heart and her feet and higher and lower than both.  
><em>

"_Please, please, please..._"

"_Do you love me?_"

"_Yes..._"

"_Tell me she was lying._"

"_Chuck..._"

_Her back arched, and the world ended in ecstasy and fire._

"Yes."

There was a strange kinship between them at that moment, a moment when she was remembering and knew he was remembering too. She could see it in the taut lines of his mouth and jaw, in the way he watched her as if waiting to see if she would fight or fly. He looked truly handsome to her for an instant, not depraved or self-satisfied or hateful because of the memories he brought. He looked handsome, and he looked lost.

And then it was over.

"I'm sorry for this."

"This?"

"Miss Jennifer Tallulah Humphrey will now be residing at the New Netherland Hotel," Chuck announced grandly, as condescending and maddening as any one person could be. "You might want to remember that for when calling hours come around. You might also want to remember that she's a distant cousin of yours and under my protection, and any attempt to undermine that identity would be a mistake on your part." He did not try to touch her again, checking himself when she turned her head away and he made to catch her chin. "I'm bored of hounding you myself and ending up with bloody knuckles for my trouble. Perhaps a rival will teach you about life as the underdog, and then we'll understand one another better."

"I won't forgive you for this," Blair swore. "Maybe in one year, maybe in five, I would have forgotten that you kissed me without permission and called me a whore. But this – I will never forgive you this."

"Contrary to popular belief, my world does not revolve around you and your forgiveness."

Blair forewent politeness, self-preservation and modesty and leant forward, holding her face mere inches from his as she cooed, "How very droll, Bass. How very amusing, because you know what the world sees when it looks at you? Poor little Charles Bartholomew, no parents, no friends, wastes his life chasing after a woman who will _never_ give him what he wants, never tell him yes and never apologise for reminding him that everyone still knows he's the new money boy who used to trip over his tongue and choose the wrong knife at dinner."

His expression didn't shift, and nor did his intentions clarify. "I am, Waldorf, sorry for the loss of your maid. I believe that leaves you with a mother who hates you, a maid who will soon rise above you..." The tip of his nose bumped hers, and Blair started. "Poor little B," Chuck purred. "The girl who not even Chuck Bass loves anymore."

"I refuse to let you call me that."

"B," he murmured. "I forgot they called you that."

"I won't let you kiss me again."

"I'm not going to kiss you again."

"Then stop looking as if you want to."

"Blair."

Her eyelashes curved downwards like shutters closing over her thoughts.

"I won't kiss you again," Chuck told her, and his words were quiet and vehement and stunningly sincere. "Not until you ask. Not until you beg – you were rather good at that, as I recall."

_Please, please, please._

"Get out."

He didn't look back at her as he exited, and Jenny along with him. She carried nothing with her, no hairbrush or fashion journal or pair of slippers, and Blair climbed the staircase back up to her room with the weary dragging step of a debutante after a night of dancing. An unseen housemaid had already cleared up the broken flower stems and smashed vase, and the house was silent. On her bed lay a sheet of notepaper, ostensibly placed there by Jenny while Chuck was manhandling her and being unbearably superior. A spiky hand marked its pearly surface.

_Be near me when my light is low  
>When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick<br>And tingle, and the heart is sick  
>And all the wheels of Being slow.<br>Be near me when the sensuous frame  
>Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;<br>And Time, a maniac scattering dust  
>And Life, a Fury slinging flame.<em>

_Ridiculously sentimental and horribly trite, but it made me think of you. Wear something pretty tonight, won't you?_  
>– <em>C<em>

She _was_ a Fury, and she was furious as she shredded the missive with her nails, clawed at the coverlet, pounded on the bed and for perhaps the second time in her life, completely indulged herself in feeling absolutely everything Blair Waldorf had it in her to feel. Rage blurred with sorrow, with desire and loneliness, with heat and cold; it had subsided by the time her writing desk was unlocked and the shoelace wrapped bundle of letters was exposed to the light. In spite of herself, Blair couldn't destroy them. To deny one's past was to deny oneself, after all, and Jenny Humphrey would learn that in time.

It was to that end that she penned a short note to one Mr Asher Hornsby and rang for a maid to tidy her room once again. As she placed the envelope on a silver tray, Blair found herself humming the opening bars of Verdi's _Sempre Libera_: 'Always Free'.

* * *

><p><em><strong>'Sometimes you have to allow yourself to be weak in order to grow stronger' - something to think about.<br>Thanks to for both/either chapter, and to you all for the birthday wishes: **_**blair4eva, QueenBee10, tiff xoxo, Kate2008, Trosev, D, flipped, Arazadia, dreamgurl, Nikki999, mlharper, BellaB2010, thegoodgossipgirl****, Ioli, signaturescarf, tinamarie333, CBfanhere, katharienne, RhettButler, Temp02, TruC7, KM, SaturnineSunshine, LeftWriter224, Maribells, batgirl2992,**** lookinforlove, CBLove21, Poinsettia, Claussxis _and_ louboutinlove.**_**  
><strong>_


	12. Vanity Unfair

**11. Vanity Unfair**

Mr Asher Hornsby took his coffee with whisky, and Blair found herself rather inclined to do the same. Examining her guest as they shared a late morning brew, she reflected that she had rarely ever seen a gentleman dress with such flair. His suit had a large pattern of regular blue checks over white, and his cravat was pale yellow and held in place with a diamond pin. His shoes shone like mirrors, and his hair was parted just so, and he drank coffee with his little finger sticking out in a manner which managed to be both affected and, at the same time, charming.

"You're quite an institution," the Gamesome Gallant reported cheerfully as he drained his cup. "I believe Mrs Berry Vanderbilt put it best: 'be like Miss Waldorf, who is always such a good girl'." He smiled winsomely. "You hardly seem the type to be selling secrets."

Blair immediately poured more coffee, staying her hand while a generous amount of liquor was added. "Not selling, Mr Hornsby, but perhaps buying."

"Oho, my dear Miss Waldorf." His blue eyes were alight with interest. "Do you want to find out if that secret lover you've been hiding from us all has been faithful?"

"I have no lover."

"No?" Setting down his cup, Asher leaned forward conspiratorially. "Everyone else has, you know. I could tell you about a Vandergelt who spends her Sunday afternoons with a Hamilton and a Cutting with a Cash – but I digress. You wish to purchase my services?"

"I wish to engage you primarily in an investigatory capacity, but I was also hoping you might consent to be my escort tonight."

"Opening night at the opera." His well-kempt brows rose. "The heart-rending La Traviata. Do you wish to make me your courtesan, Miss Waldorf?"

"I believe I would have to pay for your services in either case."

A hearty laugh emanated from the Gamesome Gallant, and he touched his ribs as if they hurt him. "For that wit alone, Miss Waldorf, you may have my evening with no charge. As for the other matter, I shall take payment in kind: a secret or two. A confidence shared between ladies. Anything from where one can buy Miss van der Woodsen's hat to whether Miss Coates is letting her English lord take French liberties. Even you yourself." His attention refocused upon Blair, and it was rather like being magnified. "So many gentlemen would beat a path to you door did you not seem captivated by the company of Mr Bass..."

"Mr Bass is politics."

"Not pleasure?"

Blair smiled thinly. "Only politics."

"What a very great shame for my readers. There's nothing like nursing a sore head over a nice glass of juice and a nice juicy romance in my column." He proffered the flask of whisky and Blair, feeling very bold indeed, added some to her coffee before taking a sip. It invigorated her, that heat mixed with bitterness in just the way that Chuck's single malt did not. Chuck...she traced the rim of her porcelain cup.

"I propose a trade," she said. "You dig up all the dirt you can on Mr Bass, and after I have had it you may publish it in your column. If you find nothing, you have nothing to print. No win, no fee. I believe in paying for results, Mr Hornsby, and I'm guessing so do you." Their gazes met over the crockery, and Blair added casually, "Oh, and you have nothing to fear from me. I already know your little secret."

"I have no secrets, Miss Waldorf."

"A gossipmonger with no secrets is a hypocrisy."

"A socialite with no lover is a hypocrisy."

"I would rather be alone than be commented upon," Blair replied simply. "All I want in life is a respectable marriage, and I don't need Sunday afternoons in the servants' quarters or days at the races with some Harvard dropout to get that, or to remind me that I'm Blair Waldorf. Mrs Berry Vanderbilt knows my name. I would never risk that good name and make one for myself as a light-skirt just to indulge some lower passions."

"I would not consider passion 'low' in the least." Asher placed his left ankle on his right knee and tapped a finger against his temple. "If you do indeed know my little secret, then you know that you and I both share a preference for gentlemen. A girl's love can be light and silly, but the kind of love a man gives in return; why, that runs deeper and climbs higher than any other emotion one can express." His air became understanding, almost gentle. "I watched you dance with Mr Bass, Miss Waldorf, and I have watched you both before now, and I think there is nothing light or silly about what lies between you."

"There is nothing between us."

"Only politics?"

"Yes." The whisky burned this time, hotter than Hell on her tongue. "Only politics."

_**~#~**_

She was tied to a chair, and he was taking malicious pleasure in it. He'd done right by Blair's little maid, goddamn them both, and then she had stuffed her face and promptly vomited all over the carpet and refused to take instruction. So, under the guise of teaching her how to sit correctly, Chuck had tied Jenny to a chair and placed a book atop her head. She was silently resentful by this point, no longer shrieking, and he was in his shirtsleeves and unfailingly amused. Yes, there was a certain similarity between them – new and newer – and yes, he was well aware of her little crush. That didn't give her any right to behave like a spoiled brat.

But then, he knew perfectly well where she'd picked that up.

"You shouldn't have to lean forward to reach your fork, and it's impolite to do so, but neither should your back be touching the chair. Stay upright. Look at your food, but don't focus upon it. You should be more involved in the conversation than anything else."

"Why do I have to learn all this?" The corners of her mouth were turned down, and her gaze could have been called imploring were it not so obdurate.

"Surely you know the games they play, all the things that will be used against you."

"Miss Waldorf would never –"

"Miss Waldorf will do as she damn well pleases," he returned sharply. "Thus far she has kept her hands clean, but she will try her hardest to prevent you ascending, even if she has to grip your ankles and pull you down herself."

"How do you feel about her?"

Chuck laughed, and it grated low in his throat. "I make a point of sabotaging her at every turn and my sole purpose for returning to the city was to torture her. Her world is empty, Jenny, for all you think there are lights across the water. There are shadows, and pale imitations of true feelings and desires, but the only real things are the diamonds. Miss Blair Waldorf is a sickeningly implacable creature hiding behind a mask of virtue. She herself is a mirage, and the girl she once was is long dead."

Jenny eyed him shrewdly. "You don't believe that."

"No?"

"No." She sat straighter, wriggling against the restraints that held her, and there was a flash of something across her pretty face. "You know Miss Waldorf has very small feet."

"Everyone knows she has very small feet, she considers them her prize asset."

"Then you know she has to have her shoes made very specially, copied from another design, and some simply will not fit. She goes shopping on the Broadway, and she finds pretty ones that she adores, and you see her eyes glaze over." Jenny paused, her neat pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips. "But they will not fit, and she can't have them. Still, she'll go back to see them time and time again, though you can see she's being eaten up inside over a pair of shoes which will never fit her and which she can never have."

"Your point being?"

"She sickens you, and yet you return time and time again and your eyes glaze over when you look at her. You touch her as if she is somehow too hot to handle, like a pan on the boil, and yet you must touch her nonetheless. Do you love her still?"

"If you knew what you were talking about," Chuck told her coldly. "You wouldn't even ask that question." He took a knee beside the chair where she was bound, though his intention was neither romantic nor chivalrous. "I will feed you and clothe you and house you and do everything it takes to make them kiss the toes of your boots and think themselves blessed, but do not think to factor me in as your confidante. My purpose in taking you on was to spite _her_, to humiliate _her_, and deeper than that my feelings do not run. We're at war, little Jenny Humphrey, and you would do well to remember whose side you're on. And stop wearing that scent in your hair."

"But Miss Waldorf –"

"Which is your trout fork?"

So _she_ ran through his life, as changeable as a vein of mercury, infecting all he did and everything he came into contact with. It was the exact opposite of a Midas touch: every part of his empire felt like dross while Blair was unconquered, unrepentant, still waiting to be kissed even when she raged at him or had him back her into corners. The fact that he seemed to keep succeeding was unsatisfying, since she would just build herself up again and reign to turn up her nose another day. He scratched the surface and saw her and hated himself, and then she was gone. He had even made her bleed, fighting for her with a desperation he had thought lay dormant; she was his, his right, unworthy of being sliced up by some abortionist when he should be the last thing she saw before her eyes shut and she was martyred, defeated, lost. Perhaps that was why he kissed her: beauty did, after all, taste sweetest when it had so little time left.

_**~#~**_

"This?"

"Miss Waldorf, do you plan to make us all stare or snore?"

"Mr Hornsby!" Blair turned on him like a viper, ostensibly affronted. "A paid companion would never dream of being so rude."

"Aren't you glad I'm not? Now, answer the question."

"Stare."

"Then put that thing from the Dark Ages away and go back into your press."

The latch of a third press clicked as Blair turned the key, removing frocks and dresses and gowns laid down with lavender and tissue paper in between. She drew out pale tangerine and mint and lavender and midnight and white after white, then lilac and forest and sky and sea. Finally, beneath several black bombazines, there was a slash of cerise. Without further ado, Asher plunged in and drew it out: the finest of silks with barely any shaping underneath, clinging to his fingers, the sleeves mere wisps and details to drape around bare shoulders and be forgotten. It would fit one woman alone, for there were a thousand tiny tucks to draw it in and unto a second skin. Blair blushed.

"My greatest act of rebellion. My mother didn't even know I was having it made."

"And why should she?" The gossipmonger breathed. "My dear Miss Waldorf, this is a marvel. Wear this tonight, and you'll be in no one's shadow. No one will overlook you. No one could if they tried."

"It's indecent."

"It's perfect."

"It was never meant for public consumption!" Still, she fingered the fabric, noting the way it shifted and shone beneath the light.

"I know full well why you want me to accompany you tonight," Asher said quietly. "And you know full well that by accepting, I am risking being beaten soundly for my trouble or at the very least snubbed for cards and cigars. It's not enough to dip a toe, Miss Waldorf. If you want to rise beyond his reach, then you need this dress. You may be our best and brightest, but he has become rich and respected for it. An army of debutantes turning their noses up at poor table manners and a lack of blue blood are nothing compared to which way the wind is blowing financially. Trust me." His teeth grinned in a shark-like grin. "I'm a journalist."

The room was warm, and the air felt heavy. It was thick with lavender from the presses, thick with lavender from the soap scenting Blair's face and arms, thick with orange blossom water from her hair. The air was thick with _her_, and to stand in the midst of all of it with a gentleman who neither ogled nor threatened nor ever would was strangely liberating. He had a secret, and so did she. They were both sinners and hedonists – who in New York wasn't? – but he was trying to help her, even with the costs that might come from earning Chuck's ire.

"Blair," she announced at long last. "I like to be called Blair."

He drew the dress from the counterpane and held it up against her shoulders.

_**~#~**_

They rather resembled a mildly ravening horde, those socialites with their waists pinched and their hips wide and their lips rouged. They flocked like sheep, dressed in pastel shades of pink, ivory, pale melon green, while their escorts stood by like books in a library, all black and white and one after another after another. No one was here to see the opera, to hear the arias or exclaim over the tenor; it was simply that anyone who was anyone had a box, and anyone who wanted to check on what anyone was saying would box hop the night away and never hear a word of what was sung. As the curtain rose on the lovely Violetta's salon, however, those still chattering out in the hallway were transfixed by quite a different vision.

Blair walked with her head held high, stepping carefully, though her heart was chittering like a caged bird and her skin felt bare and the thick fur wrap around her shoulders could not disguise the sheer scandal of her dress. It was as close as a caul around a baby, shocking and exciting and dangerous and unusual, painting her like the apple of temptation where her flesh was pale and perfect and rose above the bodice and out the sleeves as if she were blossoming from the material itself. On Asher's advice, she had foregone jewellery – 'don't distract them' – save her habitual ruby ring, and her gloves reached nearly to her shoulders, but she could have been naked by the way they were all staring at her.

The Gamesome Gallant conducted her chivalrously to her box, then hung back as he heard his name called. Mrs Abrams, dressed a little too youthfully in sky-blue-pink, crooked a heavily ringed finger as Mrs van der Leyden stood by and fluttered her fan.

"Do tell us, Mr Hornsby, about what your friend is wearing."

"You see, Mrs Abrams, Mrs van der Leyden, Miss Waldorf is loathed to see so many already lovely young women hiding themselves beneath layers of petticoats and shaped bodices, since that is certainly not what God intended. In her way, she is trying to say 'I am perfect just as He in His infinite wisdom made me', and the strong colour is, I believe, to draw attention to that message."

"Why, that's positively simple! I'm quite inclined to alter my gown here and now – what an inspiration."

"Yes," said Asher softly, surreptitiously observing a vision in white tie with an elegant profile and indefatigable cat's eyes watching the velvet curtain of the Waldorfs' box close. "She is nothing short of an inspiration."

Red. Red. All Chuck could see was red. Red from her dress, from the curtain. Red bleeding into his gaze, red when he thought back to Jenny, pouting in her bedroom at being left behind. Red. His nails were biting into his palms as he took his seat, and the marks they left were red. The colour red would eat him alive if the damned opera didn't wheel out something more impressive than a doughy chanteuse surrounded by chorus members. Violetta's lamentations didn't interest him, so he indulged himself by doing what everyone else was doing: he lifted his opera glasses to his eyes and watched Blair.

There was a rustle as a man joined her, boyish and fox-faced with his lapels askew. Red. Blair turned to adjust them, and a dark curl slipped down and coiled against her neck. Red. Red. Red. Unlike him, this interloper seemed enthralled by the action on stage, though their mouths moved throughout as they discussed the twisted story of Alfredo and Violetta, Violetta and the Baron, Violetta's declining health. As the soprano eyed herself balefully in the mirror, Blair touched her own cheek. Her escort jokingly touched his, and she laughed again and turned towards him with the ruby on her finger flashing in the light.

It glinted on his glasses.

Blair's head snapped around.

Red. Red as he looked at her, as she bit her lip, as her eyes looked liquid and doe-like and exquisite. Red when her clavicle gleamed milky, as the white wrap fell from around her shoulders, as she stood. Red as she looked affronted, and hard, and left the box with quite as much aplomb as she had entered it. Red, and red, and more red with the glitter of her bare spine before the curtain closed between them.

He followed.

He knew where she was going.

The gilded ceiling of the ladies' lounge had not been repainted in the years between then and now, now and this very moment, and Blair felt hot and wrong and unwelcome in her own skin. She tried to perch on the edge of the crushed velvet settee but was frustrated even by its softness against her hands and gripped a cushion, held it to her face, tried to smother the conflict out of her by gasping and nipping at it with her teeth. One look was all it had taken – one look and the world might have seen her be strong and brave, but she was unsettled and her stomach clenched when he looked at her like that, when he watched her like that. She had succeeded, since every man there had been looking at her, so why did she feel this way? The far wall held mirrors and Blair stalked towards them, unconsciously emulating Violetta as she stared at her reflection, at her high cheekbones and arched brows, at the persimmon flush of her lips.

_Metropolitan Opera House, New York  
>1897<em>

_She had only wanted to try. Penny had told her to try, and so had Serena, and Serena was always right about these things, for all she was younger. Opera always overtook her with rapturous tears, and her mother had told her firmly to get out and only return again when she was calm._

_The ladies' lounge was quiet, calm, and pinpricks of expectation made her shiver as she curled in the corner with a cushion and slowly, slowly inched her hand past her stocking and up._

_A spark._

_A single, silent spark._

_More._

_She never meant to make a sound, but she learned and they built and she bit her lip and moved restlessly, and then there was something so good just around the corner that she couldn't help mouthing words, hissing out sweet little noises and whimpers between her teeth, arching her back and knowing that just there, right there, another minute more..._

_Eyes._

_Eyes in the doorway._

_A boy's eyes._

_But he was a bad boy, he wouldn't tell on her._

_More pinpricks._

_More sparks._

_Strange._

"I wonder what you see in there." He closed the door behind him, glowing white and black and golden in a haze halfway between the mirror and its frame.

"Get out."

"Who's your friend?"

"Does it matter?"

"If I wanted more than two players in my game, I'd induct Jenny."

"You have."

"She's a pawn. You moved her, now I do."

"Does she know that?"

"Why wouldn't she?"

Blair faced him, her dark eyes bordering black and unsmiling. "If you don't move her across the board and make her a queen, she'll do it herself. She uses people. She didn't care really for how I looked or how happy I was in myself, just as she doesn't care for you truly, despite that silly crush of hers. The idea she has of Chuck Bass is in no way who you are, and she'll hate you when she knows it."

The line of his jaw was fierce. "And who does she think I am?"

An admonishing exhalation sighed over the word. "Mine."

And silently, they regarded each other. The moments were hot and close, and the air was stifling, and she didn't flinch when he came forward, only moved backwards in accommodation until she was pressed up close to the glass and could smile over the way things had turned out.

"You tried to make me jealous again," Chuck remarked, eyeing Blair speculatively. "You deserve to be punished."

"And is this your great show of cruelty?" She taunted. "A boy's fantasy of the girl in the ladies' lounge? Grow up, Chuck."

"Why?" He said slowly, stretching out the one syllable so that it resonated and lingered long after completion. "Have you? I wonder..."

There was a reason he was famous, infamous for the things he did – it was smooth and practised and utterly electrifyingly deadly to feel the ponderous manner in which he found his way beneath her skirt, beneath that scandalous skirt which was so close to her with its thousand darts meant to deliver from evil. The first thought that came to mind was that they'd been here before; the second was that she couldn't breathe. He was gripping the back of her knees, and she felt the queerest desire to laugh at the ticklish sensation. Then the fuel trail moved higher, leaving a line of flame behind it, and she was in a desperate battle with herself against the things he knew. Someone had taught him – or perhaps he'd taught himself – to seduce, but now they were playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded and his finger on the trigger.

Her trigger.

They were nose to nose, teeth bared, and that dangerous scarlet bodice trembled with every breath.

"May I be frank?" She wouldn't close her eyes, wouldn't look away, she wouldn't, she wouldn't. "As much as you disgust me, being touched is not a punishment. It's an occupational hazard of being a good wife, in fact."

"Oh." He spoke with such satisfaction that it was almost a purr. "It's not being touched that frightens you. What scares you is the thought that the way you feel now, with your heart beating everywhere and the fire below...you fear it won't ever be possible again." And he pressed two fingers to the delicate flesh of her throat, relished the blaze of heat just beneath. "You'll take your suit of armour and your fancy name to bed, but you'll never feel like this. You'll never be excited by someone you really, truly disgusts you. You can't counterfeit affection like that."

Blair's face was a white candle, burning, blinding. "Can't I?"

She pushed against him, against the very edge of the sensation she was feeling, finding a stuttering rhythm that had little enough to do with friction and far more with the way he was looking at her, with the way that his eyes were shot through with dark light and gold. He was on the edge as much as she was, dying to make her bend, dying to make her bend backwards and break. She could smell it. She could taste it when she tasted his mouth, when she pushed her lips against his in a ferocious imitation of a kiss. Where her heart was, she didn't know – or did, and refused to acknowledge it – but its steady thump-thump-thump kept pace with their kind of dance, with the bellow of music from beyond the closed door, with the molten caramel running-over-boiling-over-melting feeling as she gasped and he laid his cheek against hers and breathed in tandem.

Then all the world was still and silent.

The singing had stopped.

The first act was over.

Chuck waited until the last quakes had receded and Blair's eyes were plum oil dark and glossy with heat, strands of hair clinging to her damp forehead. She looked half wild and not a little tragic, but undeniably beautiful.

"Sweet dreams tonight, princess," he murmured, and then disentangled their destinies and left with no further threat or retaliation than that.

Only once he was out in the thoroughfare of the opera, people surging past on both sides, gorgeous dresses and gorgeous faces and white tie and the fizz of champagne and laughter all around did Chuck pause, smooth back his hair, lean against the wall and finally allow his hands to shake. Red. There was no excuse. Red. There was no way of sweeping this away, calling it foreplay for her humiliation or his curiosity. It had been simple, simple giving, simple voyeurism, the uncomplicated pleasure of making a kind of love without making apologies or begging forgiveness. He had done it because he was hot and she was wearing an unspeakable red dress, because he had seen things staring him down from beyond her lashes that no other person was supposed to see. It was a secret – their secret – and such was the price of sharing anything in her world. If there was no bill to be paid and no one to sing praises to, then it had to be a secret. Everything real was a secret.

Those were the thoughts that Chuck Bass thought as he returned to his hotel, loosened his tie and lay on his bed with red-rimmed eyes, waiting out the night until birds sang and drowned out the arias still ringing in his ears.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to:<strong>_** tinamarie333, Claussxis, bookworm455, Laura, SaturnineSunshine, blair4eva, mroisman, Arazadia, Kate2008, CBfanhere, Nikki999, Marina, thegoodgossipgirl, threewordseightletters, louboutinlove, TruC7, Maribells, LeftWriter224, MegamiTenchi, jamieerin, mlharper, signaturescarf, Temp02 _and_ Poinsettia.**


	13. Debut

**12. Debut**

The ends of her fingers were red raw, many times burnt as Jenny stood before the mirror and tried to smoke. Butts littered the pretty pink carpet beneath her feet as she coughed over and over, dropping the tail end of another black cigarette and meeting her own watery blue eyes. Blair dyed her ciggies to match her gowns; Jenny would dye hers black to be chic and French and to match her purpose. The future she craved was a glorious one: a world where every other girl might as well wear black and mourn because she, little Jenny Humphrey, was the fairest and brightest and best beloved of them all.

Then _he_ would deign to visit her more than once a day, and she would bloom like a rose and everything would be wonderful.

Not that everything wasn't halfway to wonderful already, of course. Every morning, Jenny rose far too early for a fashionable lady to touch all the things in her room. She stroked the enamel ewer and washbasin, traced the carvings in the dresser with her fingertip. She patted the strawberries embroidered in red and green and pearly pink on the cushions of the easy chair and pretended she knew the taste. She opened the press and ran her fingers along her five ready made dresses, for which she had five pairs of shoes, and then pulled a shawl around her shoulders and watched the sun rise over the city.

So her life was very nearly perfect but for his absence, an absence which was not entirely of the body. Chuck was often distant in his thoughts, short-tempered, sharp. He looked to be in turmoil sometimes, such looks of acute agony or anger crossed his face. Gone was the cool composure which made him appear controlled even in the face of the great provocation that was Blair Waldorf – Jenny's new French maid Elise whispered that Mr Bass returned to his hotel only to order girl after girl, sometimes up to five in one night. He didn't visit with debutantes anymore, and seemed constantly restless on whatever piece of furniture he appropriated.

But today was going to be different. Today he was buying her very first bespoke dress, and she would drive to and back from the Broadway in a carriage, and everything was going to be just grand. It would be grand when Chuck arrived at long last, and she could stop trying to smoke and running towards the window. As another butt fell, Jenny smoothed her dress – it too was black, with neat frills of black lace at the cuffs and neck. After a lifetime in the colour, she was sure she ought to hate it but, like the cigarettes, it marked her out as different, superior to the rest. With that thought in mind, she fluffed the newly cut fringe which hovered above her forehead like a flyaway halo and impatiently tapped her foot.

"Miss Humphrey?" Elise faltered in the doorway, a blander incarnation of Jenny's old self.

"Mr Bass is here."

"Is he?"

No matter how late he came, she wasn't well-polished enough to hide the excitement in her voice. Jenny believed herself quite in love, for the more time she spent observing a person so like her in spirit – his dislike of society's grandees, his hatred of Blair, his lowly origins – the more she was sure they were destined for one another.

"He is waiting for you in the parlour."

Chuck was watching the street, the back and forth of the lifeblood of New York City: people. He had never been one of them, never been laid so low as to have to work for a living, but there was a certain affinity. According to anyone who mattered, he came from nothing; his worth now came from the oil in California, from the sticky black gold that may as well be running through his veins for all he relied upon it. Even he didn't know how rich he now was, but it was enough: enough to establish himself, enough for a Fifth Avenue residence, enough to marry, enough to destroy Blair Waldorf...his thoughts of her were tainted with red, with heat, with his upper teeth grinding the lower to stubs. He had to shake it. He was already on five girls a night, five girls he often sent away and told never to come back. Chuck didn't like repetition, but the repetition of words and images and breathy little gasps in his head was driving him to distraction.

"You're here."

Jenny had slid in quietly, as she always did. It was the habit of a maid but it was useful, so he had not thus far tried to rid her of it.

"As you see."

"Is something wrong?"

There was mild levity in her face, like whatever he said would amuse her. It irritated him, particularly in his rattled frame of mind.

"There will be if you waste any more of my time."

She lowered her head, and he felt a prickle of remorse that would quickly pass. With enough callousness, enough regression, everything he felt would pass. His annoyance and guilt over Jenny as she directed her sullen gaze at the floor, his attachment to the city, the unacceptable, unutterable hot and cold for Blair; they would all pass.

_Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York  
>1897<em>

_Blair had gone to the ball as Trilby O'Ferrall, dressed in a French lieutenant's coat and striped petticoat, and was cheerfully engaged in turning up her nose at the surrounding comtes and duchesses. The party's theme had produced the same silly girls and foppish boys she usually spent her days with, only 'disguised' with their hair powdered high and slender red ribbons around their throats to depict the line of a guillotine._

_Sneering quite merrily, Blair stood in the shadow of a soaring pillar – where her mother's eagle eyes could not penetrate – and examined each reveller as they passed. Only one caught her eye, quite literally: an outrageous figure in a pure white suit and black plague doctor mask noticed her peeping, and one eyelid lowered in a conspiratorial wink. She swung back out of sight behind the pillar, her stomach migrating rapidly upwards when she realised who she'd seen, and who had seen her._

_Since that night at the opera, Blair had been studiously avoiding Chuck Bass, and was more than a little upset that she could pick him out of the masses at all. It was his eyes, she supposed, since she'd seen more of them than the rest of him...and yet she knew it was him when there was a movement behind her, fingers closing around her upper arm with a surprising familiarity._

"_Thank you,_"_ she said stiffly. _"_But I don't need a doctor._"

_He chuckled, low and soft in his throat like a cat's purr. _"_Am I permitted to hang around you like a disease nonetheless?_"

"_No._"

"_Waldorf –_"

"_Bass._"

_It was almost a challenge, that cool ring of command in the voice of a little girl._

"_Are you well?_"

"_I wasn't unwell when you last saw me._"

"_Are you sure? You seemed rather...flushed._"

_Blair turned on him slowly, as slowly as if they were turning in a dance, but her mouth was set in a hard and perhaps petulant line. She was flushing now, wings of red blooming across her too young face. _"_From this moment forward, the events of that night will never be mentioned again, is that clear?_"

"_Not as clear as the memory of you purring through the door, which I have been replaying over and over..._"

"_You wouldn't tell_."

"_No,_" _he admitted, with the maddening air of being older, wiser and far more experienced than she._ "_A gentleman never reveals the secrets of a lady._"

"_You're not a gentleman._"_ She began sketching a pattern on the floor with the toe of her slipper. _"_I suppose you've made love to lots of women._"

"_Enough._"

"_How many, exactly?_"

"_Too many._"

"_How many is too many?_"

"_Enough_."

_He enraged and intrigued her, his too short answers not answering the questions naïve curiosity provided; Blair flung herself away from him and forgot her ladylike manners long enough to charge across the floor and collapse onto a damask loveseat beside Serena, then smiled nervously at everyone who stared as if to make recompense._

An invitation to her own maid's debut was nothing short of a slap in the face. Blair poked the fire herself, viciously, ignoring the coals that spat sparks back at her. The New Netherland was not the most illustrious of locations, to be sure, but it would certainly suit the treacherous Jenny, Jenny who had been sponsored by Chuck, Chuck who had reached out for Blair despite his betrayal. She had no idea what the incident at the opera counted as, whose side they should chalk it up on. Asher had taken her trembling arm when she had finally put herself to rights, held her close to his side and then helped her into the carriage.

"It's like carnage, isn't it?"

"What?"

"Making love."

"We...we didn't."

She was still shaking, and he tucked a damp curl back into her coiffure and laid his cool palms against her cheeks. "Then my dear girl, what in the world did you do to make him look as if he were burning alive?" He studied her, smoothed her brows with his thumbs. "Do you love him?"

"Of course not."

"Then for God's sake, have him or hold him or do whatever you need to do to him, just stop torturing each other." Asher touched her face one last time as they reached the townhouse's front door, and his expression was winsome and wistful. "It isn't at all fun to burn, you know."

Blair stayed on the step a long time after that pronouncement, shivering despite her fur, removing the pins from her hair one by one until there was a mess of deep brown cloaking her bare shoulders. She felt cold even now, despite the wrapper over her day dress and the orange glow on her hands. She was tempted to throw the invitation in the fire and damn them both, but she had to remember that Jenny was somewhat innocent in all this. Who would not be seduced by wealth, by glitter, by gaiety after a lifetime standing beside or behind but never in the spotlight? There was still some hope, Blair thought, that the girl wasn't lost altogether. If she truly believed that society would accept her humble beginnings when it couldn't accept such a thing as love, she was an even greater fool than Blair had once been.

Their world was glass: see-through, sparkling, but so very thin that one blow could smash it.

Serena wouldn't be needed for this mission, and nor would Asher. This was Blair's duty, her penance, something Jenny was owed after their years together. There was the additional benefit that it took Blair's mind off the blood still surging south of her navel, and she tried very hard not to rationalise not going with the fact that Chuck would be there. Duty; penance. That was all. He would be easy enough to evade in a swell of well-wishers.

Blair was now reliant on the services of her former nanny, Dorota, who was currently down in one of the kitchens bullying the cook. When Blair had recalled her from her house and her small daughter, the diminutive woman had pinched her erstwhile charge's waist and screwed her blue eyes into a scowl.

"Your mother goes to Paris and you fast, is that it?"

"No, Dorota, I –"

"Or there is some suitor who takes up your time for eating?"

"No, but –"

"Then you eat this morning, Miss Blair. No excuses."

She had broken off into a rapid stream of Polish deriding Jenny's care of her employer and moral conduct in general, not to mention her maintenance of Blair's hair and room. Blair still didn't feel like eating, still didn't feel like feeling much at all. She drew her own bath and gazed up at the ceiling, soothing her hot skin with rose oil and washing her hair three times for the serenity of being underwater. Sitting up, she felt momentarily refreshed – and then she noticed it. Blurred by the water, it was a tiny thing: the neat pink crescent of a fingernail mark along the forbidden run of her inner thigh. She hadn't felt the tiny slip, but as she matched her own index to the groove she could see the formation of a fist.

He had curled up his fingers, as if at war with some emotion he couldn't say out loud.

Blair's face became blank, and later she rubbed cold cream over the mark until it was almost completely erased by white. She was white all over, cold once again as she rang the bell and Dorota helped her into her undergarments, muttering her disapproval as Blair ordered her to cinch her corset tighter. Anything more than eighteen inches was unacceptable, and Blair's naturally petite figure could be pushed to sixteen if she were prepared for the pain.

She chose plum, a deeply coloured gown with sleeves that just capped her shoulders. Blair looked at her arms, at the betraying birthmark he knew was there; soon black gloves rose almost to her shoulders. The palms and backs of the hands were overlaid with embroidery, deadening the sensation of touch like gauntlets. Ribbons of black pulled her bodice even closer to her skin, and soon her chest was numb too. She could just about breathe, and that was enough. Dorota clucked as she put up her hair, but Blair fixated only on her mouth as she painted it and considered her speech to Jenny. The New Netherland was uncharted territory, newer and 'faster' than the Waldorf or other reputable hotels. The kind of people who attended debuts were not the people Blair would choose to associate with, but she'd already decided to go and would not be persuaded otherwise by what was thought of her afterwards.

She was fully aware of the irony.

_**~#~**_

The party began too early for anyone's taste but Jenny's, as she'd already met Mrs Tilt and Mrs von Rohr and Mrs Amersfoort, and had much enjoyed their company. Her new dress – one of many, obviously, since she was an heiress entrusted to Mr Bass by her father before his untimely death – had been much complimented for the charming black feathers fanned across her breast, and Mrs Bergen had advised lemon juice as a rinse for her hair, and the champagne was lovely and the bubbles spilt over her tongue every time the waiter refilled her glass.

The only problem was, yet again, Chuck. She had asked him, with much batting of her lashes, to mingle, and he appeared to be doing so. Her objection came from the fact that he was entertaining a group of young ladies who hadn't even spoken to her and that, as her escort, he should be mingling politely and then returning to her side to see if there was anything she needed. She was getting very close to being cross with him, which was horrible when there was so much to be gay about, what with her favourite daisies scattered all over the room and people asking her to tell them again about her dramatic life story.

"Out West," Jenny sighed, and then dabbed at her eyes with a spotless white handkerchief she demanded must be changed every hour, whether there were tears on it or no. "I was so happy. My mother and father and brother and I lived on a ranch near the mine and the smelt. Daddy liked to inspect everything himself, to congratulate his workers after a hard day...and then one day, he didn't come back. Mother ran to the door, and there was a great cloud of ash and – do excuse me –" Dab, dab, while their tongues lolled out and panted for more scandal. "And then she died of grief, you see. I don't know where my dear brother Daniel is. If Mr Bass hadn't fulfilled his promise to my father and taken me in, I don't know what I would've done!"

"And Mr Bass?" They pressed. "What is your relationship with him, my dear?"

Jenny dropped her head coyly and flushed, half from artifice and half from the champagne. "He _is_ my sponsor," she stage whispered. "But maybe in the future...of course I'm not a lady of his calibre."

They clucked and reassured her that she was, she was such a dear, she was such a beauty, they were so happy to be her new friends.

And then the crowd by the door parted.

The invitation had been a mere nicety, a nicety meant to offend and incense, not encourage. Jenny pressed her red lips together because Blair's lips were redder, fuller, brushed self-consciously at her new fringe because Blair's hair fell just so, laid a hand on her laced in waist and shrieked inside because she had had nothing but Vichy water all day and Blair still seemed slimmer.

Blair felt heat rising from the guests as she entered, like the audience at a fight or particularly licentious play. She recognised several faces from Chuck's party, and made sure to keep her own turned towards her goal: Jenny. Her former maid looked like the angel of death, all gowned in black with her cheeks and her little mouth rouged and her blonde hair piled high and adorned with silk flowers. It was as if Blair were hiding at a masquerade again, only now she was older and harder and could see the alcohol turning Jenny's ire into elation.

"Blair!" She trilled, and waltzed across the floor to wrap her in her bony arms. Blair, a consummate professional, hugged the other girl back and pasted a smile on her lips.

"Darling Jenny," she said warmly. "What a wonderful party."

"It is, isn't it?" Jenny companionably hooked her arm through Blair's and began to propel them through the throng, nodding and smiling like an expensively dressed automaton. The truth – that she believed that this was the truth – was written all over her face, corroborated by the sense of comfort which made her think she could drink or laugh around these people and not be considered outlandish and crude.

Blair realised this as she realised who was a few feet to the left of her, so snapped open her fan and led Jenny quietly into a corner.

Innocence was a luxury very few debutantes were allowed, and Eleanor had cultivated her daughter's to manoeuvre her into prime position in the marriage mart. She had been canny though Blair was not, though it would take her some time to understand that what she wanted wasn't necessarily what was best for her. If she'd learnt earlier, maybe she wouldn't be being punished now. No, innocence came at a high price, and this lesson was one Blair had to impart to Jenny before she thought of her dreams as reality and these vultures as her friends. A mission of mercy, perhaps, but not one which Blair carried out selflessly or with much genuine care.

Jenny turned as they slipped into an alcove, spun on the spot like a dancer. The champagne backlit her eyes Fabergé blue, highlighting darkened irises with swirls of bubbles spilling from her pores. She was giddy, so giddy that she swayed close to Blair when the older girl wrapped her fingers around her arm and stared into Jenny's flushed face. The newness and decadence of this world, this world which she had been born into and which her maid had never known was still too much; the light from the chandelier shattered gold across her clavicle and the bridge of her nose.

"This isn't real, Jenny," said Blair softly, trying to be kind. "They don't respect you. They don't even like you for any other reason save that Mr Bass has practically paid them to. This is not a world of truths – you will never be loved, no matter who says it or how many times they do."

"They've been saying it all night: aren't you pretty? Aren't you clever?"

"They're lying to suit themselves and flatter you."

"Oh." Her gaze crystallised in a matter of moments, and the air of delighted intoxication was gone. "So this is how it's going to be. Me against you."

"That's not what I –"

"You may be the Queen of Hearts, Blair –" Jenny seemed to take immense satisfaction from the one syllable that had been denied her as a subordinate. "But I'm the Queen of Diamonds now, and there's only one man I want as my king."

Blair felt cold again, as cold as when she first went ice skating with her father and fell, chill air and water seeping through her coat. "He won't love you."

"Why? Because he loves you?"

"Because he can't love anyone!" Music began to throb from the sides of the room. Jenny needed to be shaken or slapped, and Blair felt a queer vindictive desire to rip every blonde hair from her head and make her listen. "He can't even see you past what he wants to do to me, all the ways he wants to ruin me. That's not love, is it, but it's something! It's something you shouldn't want to supersede!"

_I'm the Queen of Diamonds now_.

"And you're not a queen," she added spitefully, against her better judgement. "You have to be cool to be queen, and you look at Chuck Bass like he's something to eat when he'll never, never want you."

They shone, both beautiful in strange and contrasting ways, Blair carrying the wishes of the old world while Jenny rebutted with those of the new. They were vainglorious black pearls hanging from Jenny's ears and her hairpins were made of jet. Blair uncharitably rebranded her a crow.

"At least," Jenny murmured, tottering closer to her adversary as if by a tipsy accident. "I didn't risk everything for 'love', because it only happened once, didn't it? That's what he does every night, you know, only once with a score of girls who don't look like you or smell like you or hold themselves like you. They know they're whores." She lowered her head like a bull for the final blow, her smile grim and greedy. "It's time you did too."

Blair gasped and swung back her hand, only to have it seized. She was boiling, blazing up with rage, hissing inaudible epithets for the good of her social standing while an arm closed around her waist and she was dragged bodily but oddly elegantly away from Jenny, his grip tight with his black gold gaze and silent smirk challenging anyone to make more of them than they appeared, as the well matched pair the Gamesome Gallant had decided they were. Jenny let out a peal of laughter to draw attention back to her, and the ballroom refilled with chatter as they reached the door and Blair twisted out of Chuck's grasp with barely concealed venom.

"How dare you embarrass me like that!"

"It's not me who's disrespecting these fine people, it's you." But his look was level, forthright, assessing only the paling of her cheeks and brightness fading from her eyes with no apparent interest in the room's other inhabitants. "Why did you come here tonight?"

"She needed to know." The reception had resumed, the champagne was flowing again. Even that couldn't explain away Jenny's behaviour. "She needs to know that this isn't real."

"Evidently," he drawled. "Seeing as the only thing that's ever been real is me and you."

Her head snapped up from inspection of the polished floorboards, holding the moment between them for a long time. He was mocking, earnest, galling and duplicitous all at once; she couldn't separate the meanings behind his words, the faces behind his face. When he spoke to her like a lover, was he tormenting her with the past? Was he tormenting them both with the future? It was hard enough to push out her crushed ribs, harder still when she saw his expression shift and knew he was still affected by exactly what she was – the heat, the aria pounding hard in her head, her heart like a bird in a cage.

"Until we decide...that is, I don't know...we don't want a repeat of yesterday."

"We don't?"

"No." She shook her head. "Things like that only muddy the waters."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Truce?" There was no command in her tone, only tiredness. The little girl had grown weary of playing chess, exhausted by a never-ending stalemate. Blair ceremonially removed her right glove, biting down a little on her unsteady lower lip as she extended her hand.

Chuck looked down, said nothing, thought nothing or tried not to, then grasped her fingers and felt the immediate reflex. He hadn't tried to enclose her hand, merely join it with his own, and Blair had accommodated him automatically, as if she were used to doing so. Her index and middle finger separated, and he felt a strange longing to stroke the vulnerable little V where they'd divided. He was as tired as she was, more so, but perhaps it was enough to let her alone a while and resume at a later date when he could sleep, when even touching her hand wasn't like laying his on a hot stove. Her lips parted, and she drew back from him just as he had from her the night before, the severance just as harsh and sudden and destructive.

He was thinking.

He must try not to do that.

"I can see myself out," Blair breathed, already beginning the cleansing in her head, already curling up inside, already preparing to scrub her skin raw to scrub out the feelings, the softness, the tiny flowers opening that needed to be crushed.

"You know the way," he returned.

She was gone into the lilac of an early evening, gone like smoke with substance. He leaned against the doorframe and lit up, solitary despite the numerous vices waiting behind him. Chuck breathed in fire because, while moths were attracted to it, his limited knowledge of butterflies indicated that they would burn. He felt the papery wings begin again inside him, fragile little beats and swoops, and inhaled to torch his stomach and clear his mind of the past.

A girl.

A ring.

He watched the spot where she had disappeared until another filled the space.

* * *

><p><em><strong>No, I'm not dead. I am, however, back from India, an official undergrad come October and very happy to be with you all again. Yes, lurkers, even you. Thanks to: <strong>_**LeftWriter224, TruC7, dreamgurl, MegamiTenchi, Kate2008, Claussxis, bookworm455, Anon _(to answer your question, yes, they did have a kind of sex last chapter, but it wasn't what you'd call the usual kind)_, BellaB2010, Arazadia, SaturnineSunshine, Nikki999, ggoddess, CBfanhere, blair4eva, Star-crossed92, Poinsettia, teddy bear, jamieerin, louboutinlove, Temp02, threewordseightletters, Maribells, mlharper _and_ signaturescarf.  
><strong>


	14. Show Thine Enemy

**13. Show Thine Enemy**

"You seem happy."

"I am." Blair tilted the brim of a white chip straw hat further down over her brow and turned to one side to admire the angle. "I like this, do you think the ribbon can be changed?"

"You know it can, and that's evasion if ever I heard it."

"Maybe something in violet? Mr Carroll, could you –"

"Blair!" Serena's voice rang out, shocking the small man who had leapt to Blair's side the moment his name was mentioned. "You're happy," Serena continued, planting one hand on her sky blue hip as the proprietor slid away and snapped his fingers for the shop boys to follow him. "For the first time in weeks, you're happy! You're smiling, you're laughing, you're shopping for millinery! You haven't taken to your bed because of some edict laid upon you by –"

"He and I are good," Blair answered briskly, dismissing her reflection with the wave of one kid covered hand.

"Is that even possible?"

"Is it so hard to believe?"

"Yes – particularly coming from you, his most vocal critic." Serena watched as Blair flitted to the ribbon display, assessing her carefully. There was a lightness to her skin and her eyes which hadn't been there but a few days previously, and the neat nip of her waist indicated she was eating again. Her clavicle stood out prettily, but the shadows of her ribs had retreated, and her décolleté was concealed by an old world fichu of milky blue gauze. Inexplicably and for the first time in forever, Blair was happy, and Serena had no faith in its permanence.

"Are the two of you..."

"No." In lifting her head from perusal of the glass case, Blair's expression was momentarily veiled by her hat. It was impossible to judge if her look had changed, if her lips had moved, but there was gravity in her features as she said, "There are fewer feelings between Mr Bass and I than there are thoughts in his little protégée's head. I'm just...glad to be free, I suppose."

"So you won't mind if I invite him tonight?"

Only a week or two could pass between Serena's soirees before she declared herself bored and threw another. Her next would be a masquerade, Blair was sure of it, but this evening's was a tasteful dinner and matchmaking exercise. Every unattached beau and belle in Manhattan could either attend, or die in the attempt of finding a partner without the devious Miss van der Woodsen's patronage. Serena would be wearing deep rose pink and diamonds, Blair a sea foam coloured gown with froths of pearls along the neckline. She appeared nonplussed by her friend's question.

"If you like."

"It won't bother you if he forms an attachment?"

"Anything that distracts him from me would be pleasure unbounded."

Blair cast her gaze over a display of opera gloves and swallowed her negation. Her desire to see Chuck – a desire she could not explain, especially given the shock to her flesh the last time they had seen one another – was at war with the more deeply ingrained desire not to see him, to ignore his presence entirely. If their conflict had ended, however, she was bound to carry out the law of the land and extend him every social nicety. So what if he came to the van der Woodsens'? Serena was her friend, he would be in _her_ territory.

"S," she said casually as Serena examined a fan inlaid with real gold filigree. "Invite Mr Hornsby, will you?"

War or no war, a queen could always use more allies.

They returned to the van der Woodsens' that afternoon to find that its youngest occupant, Eric, had just arrived from Saratoga. Smaller than his Amazonian sister but taller than the petite Blair, Eric had gentle features and a gentler disposition. Despite this mildness of spirit, he was a ferocious card player, and had dealt for bridge before the girls had even put down their packages. Both lost, but prettily, and Eric had brought back some wonderful black cigars that Blair clenched between her teeth as they played. She was aware of her handsome grey dress, her expensive gloves, the soft flush of wealth that surrounded her; she was similarly aware of the idiosyncrasy of the heavily perfumed cheroot exuding smoke like a small dragon. The contrast pleased her, soothed her soul a little, and she looked forward to introducing Eric to Asher that night.

"So," Eric hedged as his thumb whirred along the edge of the deck. "How goes the husband hunting?"

"If that's your sister's way of asking where my heart lies, I advise her to try harder," Blair replied, accepting her thirteen card stack without so much as a blink.

Serena flushed. "I've been writing to him, that's all. He wasn't aware of this morning's conversation."

"So there was a conversation?" His sister played the dummy hand as Eric raised bright, interested brown eyes. "What was it about? Dresses? Flowers? The dichotomy of good and evil?" Both girls giggled, and he continued, "Or could it possibly the return of Blair's old flame, Mr Charles Bartholomew Bass, now a wealthy oil baron and still as handsome as ever?"

"His appearance doesn't concern me."

"What about his assets?"

"I couldn't care less about his Bassets."

"Then tell me about Jenny Humphrey."

Blair's gaze was fixed on her cards. "That was a miscalculation on my part – and possibly on his. He thought he could use her, I thought I could teach her. It turns out neither of us have much leeway where the recalcitrant chit is concerned." She sighed. "But as Mr Bass and I are in a state of ceasefire, I'm leaving it up to him to control her. She's not my concern anymore."

_**~#~**_

Asher kept his flask inside his waistcoat this time, laying his gloves across his knee and taking up his teacup with a smooth face and smoother smile. Across from him, Jenny took a dainty sip of the genial beverage and admired her guest. He was undoubtedly good-looking, his blue eyes piercing and his brown hair thick and flopping just so over his brow. His suit was flawlessly cut _and_ he was the Gamesome Gallant, which could be of infinite use to her.

"This is a lovely suite," Asher commented, leaning back against the cushions and waiting for Jenny to state her business.

It didn't take long.

"Blair Waldorf," she said, taking a sugared nut from the tray and nipping it delicately in two with her small sharp teeth.

"What about her?"

"You tell me."

"From what I can see, she's a paradigm of chastity and virtue. She wears all the right clothes to all the right places, knows all the right people, tragically lost her father a few years past. Mr Waldorf was a great advocate of the downtrodden, you know. He used to take his daughter to hand out turkeys to the poor every Christmas."

Jenny remembered: Blair's cheeks flushed from the cold, her fine beaverskin jacket, the red ribbon in her hair. All such charity had ceased after her father's death.

"There are some things you don't know."

"Oh?" The Gallant's eyebrows quirked. "And you wish to share them with me?"

"I wish to share them with New York," Jenny replied. "But most regrettably, Mr Hornsby, you are not my only appointment today." She had decided this sounded grown up and Blair-like, not that she was the person Jenny ought to emulate. Still, she remained a 'paradigm', whatever that meant, and therefore was not a bad role model as curtsies and dancing and lying went. Blair was not bold, but Jenny was, so next she made a shocking request. "I wonder, Mr Hornsby, if you could return this evening? Elise will be here to chaperone, of course."

The maid gave a little bob, and Asher shot her a wink which turned her pink to her ears.

"And most unfortunately on my part, I have received an invitation to Miss van der Woodsen's dinner tonight. I assume you'll be there..."

Jenny seethed. Oh, she had heard about Miss van der Woodsen's wonderful matchmaking dinner, and the gown she would be wearing, and the gown Blair would be wearing, and it made her mad all the way down to the toes of her jet beaded slippers. It was social suicide not to attend, but one could only get in with an invitation. She supposed she could comfort herself with the fact that Chuck would not be invited either, not while the little whore had control of the guest list, but it was still a matter of concern that, even after the resounding success of her debut, things had not fallen properly into place. She had been shopping twice and taken tea with Mrs and Miss Buckland, toured the park with the Misses Bouchard and called upon Mrs Verges, but still the highest echelons of the elite eluded her. She covered her ire by savaging another nut.

"I'm afraid I have not merited an invitation."

"Really?" His brows rose once again. "Well, let's see what we can do about rectifying that, shall we?"

They made polite chit-chat for perhaps half an hour before Asher took his leave, turning up his collar as he exited the New Netherland and cast acout for a cab. Out of common decency, he had not reported the scandal of Miss Humphrey's debut – the overflowing champagne, the low tastes of the guests, the even lower necklines and gaudy jewellery of said guests – and now it seemed the newest star was of a mind to knock another from her orbit. Asher disliked Jenny – he didn't know whether it was the overwhelming black, the black gloves and dress and pearl choker or just her manners in general – and had found within himself a genuine affection for Blair. He was, he reminded himself as he climbed into the leather lined comfort of a cab and gave the address of a nearby telegraph office, a sucker for star-crossed lovers.

_**~#~**_

_B STOP J digging dirt STOP Will bring to VDW to observe STOP Wear something pretty STOP A STOP_

Blair got her telegrams delivered by the good offices of Dorota's husband Vanya, and this one was brought round to the van der Woodsens' while she was being pulled into her dress by one of the household's numerous maids. Serena loved every helper and could never settle on only one to be her personal maid, so she shared her sunny disposition with every member of staff who had the honour of lacing her up. Blair did her best to be as charming with the help, but this missive was nothing short of alarming. What had Chuck told her? Jenny would surely never reveal Blair's greatest secret, not while it held such power, so what had Chuck told her? She gasped as her laces were pulled tight, then held up her arms so the pale green confection could be layered over her petticoat. Its clusters of seed pearls felt cold against her throat, then unpleasantly warm as she felt the blood creep up her face and stain it a traitorous rose.

What did Jenny have?

What had Chuck told her?

"B?" Serena glided in with her hair still falling in golden sheets and turned on the spot. "What do you think?"

"Lovely," Blair told her absently, pulling down her own hair so she could scent it. She anointed the comb with attar and set to work, making three passes before it was removed from her hand.

"B," Serena repeated, and her voice was much lower and softer. "What's wrong?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Maybe I would."

"This isn't something you could understand."

"I could try."

"You're a _virgin_, Serena."

Both girls flinched. They looked so different in the mirror, the fairy and the changeling, day and night, sun and moon. It seemed strange to think that Serena, who had so many beaus and gave away so many kisses was purer than her icily polite best friend.

"So is Jenny," she returned. "And I assume that either she or her puppeteer are behind this."

Blair gave a half-hearted laugh. "They're both coming tonight. Asher Hornsby sent me a message to let me know he's bringing Jenny, since she seems to have her grubby little fingers in a pie of my making. I'm afraid she wants the world to know about Chuck and I, that we...I can't trust him to stop her. Asher is a good man, but if he fails to give her what she wants, she'll take it elsewhere. I can't believe it's the very worst, Chuck will be keeping that back for something special. Perhaps my birthday party? Perhaps my wedding?"

"You and he are at peace."

"There's nothing he loves more than a good double-cross."

"Blair." Serena wrapped her arms around her friend's slender shoulders. "This is your party – or, more accurately, it's mine. I can have him thrown out. I can have her thrown out. I can have Asher thrown out, or I can have them thrown out one by one at different points during the evening so they can't so much as greet one another. You shouldn't be afraid." She squeezed. "Not when you look so beautiful."

They both stared into the glass, at the colours of the hair mingling like light and shade.

"Now, don't move, and don't let anyone put up your hair until I get back. My mother has a pearl circlet just right for that dress."

Blair leaned forward, bit her lip, watched it bloom and decided to forgo rouge. Asher was no kind of gallant not to tell her what her adversary would be wearing, or even whether Chuck was coming at all. She would tell him so later.

_**~#~**_

He was throwing wide. They hit left, they hit right, but no matter how hard he threw, the darts refused to hit the bull's-eye and, later, the board. Chuck knew something was wrong when they started gouging holes in the walls, and finally halted to pour himself a tumbler of scotch and stare at it. The flavour was the same, but he wasn't. He was already too high, too pent up, his eyes flickering to the invitation on the table and back again every minute or so as if he expected it to burst into flames. It was only a few lines of calligraphy, but Chuck couldn't comprehend its meaning; why would Blair's best friend want him at a dinner Blair herself was attending?

Unless...unless Blair herself wanted him there.

Impossible.

Improbable.

Unfathomable.

The path of callousness had led him absolutely nowhere, as had the grand total of twelve whores the previous evening. They had seemed satisfied, but he wasn't. He wasn't at full power, he couldn't engage. He couldn't disconnect from the feeling of Blair's slim fingers within his.

It had been a tiny gesture, utterly insignificant in the world of men. Only a few hours earlier, Chuck had met with Mr Needhold and his associates to discuss the digging of further wells. Everyone had shook hands with everyone else, and his fingers felt no more the worse for wear. His ardour for vengeance had become entirely fixated upon Jenny, upon her ability to knock Blair down – but what would he do once she was down there? His palm tingled. Perhaps revenge ought not to be his desire, but rehabilitation: for Blair to know what she had done, to feel it, but to suffer with the chance to rebuild. He could give her the chance to begin again.

What was happening to him?

Chuck downed his scotch, wrenched a dart from the wall and threw. It whistled past Jenny's nose as she entered soundlessly, her eyes wide with fright.

"What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to know if you were going to the van der Woodsens' tonight."

Chuck curled his lip, more for her benefit than his. "They have been...kind enough to invite me."

"Shall you go?"

"If it suits me."

"I'm going."

"Are you?" His tone held no inflection. She was wearing black once again, a scandalous gown with bare shoulders and a skin tight silk bodice which she had overlaid with black lace and long sleeves. It only served to made her seem more indecent to him, a child playing at being a woman when her bones were still visible and her chin was still rounded and immature. Chuck had to remind himself that Blair had been such an age when she'd left such indelible scars in his back – white and barely visible, but he still knew they were there – but she had never been as desperate to lose herself to society. No, _that_ had come with age, and he really should stop thinking about Blair when Jenny was present. It made him look at her too darkly.

"Mr Asher Hornsby invited me."

"Did he."

"He writes the Gamesome Gallant column in the Standard."

"Does he."

Jenny seemed undeterred by her benefactor's indifference. "He tells me we'll have dinner first, and then the games will begin."

"The games have already begun," Chuck told her, and stood. She remained in his shadow, appearing elated by the proximity. This crush of hers would have to be dealt with. "Have your Mr Hornsby escort you to the van der Woodsens'. I'll see you there."

"You will?"

She never turned her back on him when she left rooms, he'd noticed that. It gave his gut another twist, the deference as if to royalty, but then he summoned Arthur and drank more scotch and went to find a suit.

If he couldn't smoke out his butterflies, he'd drown them.

Only a short distance away across the city, Blair paused at the top of the stairs. Someone was playing the piano below, and its strains rose to meet her ears. She was unpleasantly warm, being halfway between cold with dread and red hot with anger and apprehension. The pearl circlet on her head had fitted a moment ago, but now it seemed too tight, cutting into her scalp. A few glossy strands of hair unfurled against her neck, curling around one side and clinging to the light sheen of sweat on her skin. Why was it so warm up here? Why was she taking so long to go down?

"Nervous?"

"No," Blair answered automatically, and Eric grinned.

"It's not a crime to be nervous."

"Why should I be nervous?"

"Let me see...all the eligible bachelors of New York are down there, getting ready to vie for your attention, all the ladies down there are preparing to begrudge you that attention, the man you formerly loved is down there with your lowly nemesis and a gossip reporter...no, no reason to be nervous at all."

"Asher wouldn't betray me." She turned, smiled a small secret smile at Eric. "I think you'd like him, you know."

"I can't think what you mean."

"E, what will you do?" Blair laid a hand on his black jacketed arm.

Eric looked away from her, examining a frieze on the landing with undue interest. "Marry a girl with a name that means something to my mother. Have children. Play a lot of bridge."

"That's not fair."

"You being too afraid to go downstairs, is that fair?"

"At least I get to admit I'm too afraid to go down."

"I've known what I am for quite some time," said Eric. "I've made my peace with never being able to say what I am. But you...you're Blair Waldorf. You shouldn't be so scared of the past, or an uncertain future. And before you say anything, no, we are not getting married so Asher and I can live happily ever after behind the scenes." He extended the arm she held. "Shall we go down, mademoiselle? I believe this is what they call 'facing the music'."

Miss Blair Waldorf and Mr Eric van der Woodsen descended the stairs in a froth of green and black, and Serena glowed appreciatively and went back to playing the piano with as much panache as several hours training per day could muster. Much to her surprise and unexpressed relief, neither Jenny nor Chuck had arrived. It was unspeakably rude, certainly, but if it meant that Blair could eat her blancmange and laugh with the three young Jones bachelors unhindered, then Serena wasn't going to complain.

What she did complain about, however, was little tarts who liked to make dramatic entrances.

"So sorry we're late, Miss van der Woodsen!" Jenny cried, breezing her way across the marble floor just as the various couples and those still uncoupled were sitting down for coffee. "Mr Hornsby and I decided to wait for Mr Bass."

Mr Bass did not look pleased to have been waited for, Serena noticed, though he was dressed elegantly enough in a formal-cum-casual tuxedo instead of tails. Mr Hornsby, on the other hand, was beaming at all and sundry and telegraphing cheer. He was acceptable. He could be introduced to Eric.

"How unfortunate for you to have missed dinner," Serena returned with a chilly smile. "We were all just getting ready for coffee and cards. I'll have a plate made up for you, Miss Humphrey. You're looking a little thin."

Jenny blanched as her hostess waltzed away. Blair, who was sitting at a small inlaid card table with two other gentlemen and an empty seat, allowed her lips to curl up like a cat's. Chuck immediately summoned a footman to fetch him a drink; Jenny and Asher took seats an unoccupied table. The scotch arrived, and Chuck leant against the piano and listened. Blair's laughter rang out once, then again as Serena rejoined the table. The other ladies seemed to be taking her lead, all disdaining their own smokes for long black cheroots. He couldn't restrain a smirk at the fury on Jenny's face when she saw that – she had only just mastered cigarettes, after all.

Then he caught the tail end of her sentence.

"...with my dear sponsor, Mr Bass."

"Really." Asher's face was impassive. "I can't quite believe that of Miss Waldorf."

"She admitted as much herself before attending a most immoral party, during which her purpose was to retrieve documents from his desk..."

"Documents pertaining to what?"

Blair was oblivious, deep in conversation with a boy with sandy hair and cheekbones like Serena's. Chuck realised suddenly why Jenny's escort seemed so familiar: he was the fox-faced, boyish man who had accompanied Blair to the opera. He had been her companion on the night of the red, and now he was selling her out. Had he wormed inside her inner circle simply to destroy her? Did he care for her? Had she refused him? Chuck was red again at the thought of this smiling boy on his knees before Blair, begging her, begging _for_ her. Red. At least he'd never pleaded. Red. At least he would never plead. Red. Red. Red. And nor would he let this pretender expose Blair. She was his to finish if she was to be finished, and he had made that infinitely clear in the ladies' lounge. Red. He recalled digging his fingers into her thigh, forming a fist when he couldn't taunt her anymore. Red, and red again.

"Mr Hornsby."

Asher turned away from Jenny, who had enough bile in her to give him reflux. The enigmatic Mr Bass was standing over him, and yes, he was devilishly handsome. Asher had his eye on the male van der Woodsen, of course, so rare was it to find an attractive compatriot, but the allure of the man caught between the despicable Jenny and beleaguered Blair was irrefutable.

"Mr Bass."

"Would you care to step outside for a moment?"

"Mr Hornsby and I were just –" Jenny was silenced by that black gold gaze upon her, blacker now and blazing and fathoms deep. Asher swallowed, decided definitely on Eric, struck Chuck as a possibility and stood.

"If you'll excuse us, Miss Humphrey."

It was still too early in the evening for complete privacy, still light enough on the streets for carriages and people. The burning man stalked a few paces down the sidewalk and Asher followed, starting as Chuck turned abruptly and pinned him in place with a glare. In a certain slant of light, he looked young, the arch of his jaw proud but still tender; he looked too young to Asher, too young to have caught fire already. The question of whether he was completely consumed had yet to be determined.

"What," inquired Chuck quietly, almost civilly. "Do you plan to do with the information Miss Humphrey is feeding you about Miss Waldorf? Publish it in your tawdry little column?"

"There is nothing tawdry about my column, Mr Bass," Asher replied coolly. "Every fact is verified before it goes to print, and all speculation is innocent, I assure you."

"Then share your facts with me. Allow me to _verify_ them for you."

The Gamesome Gallant didn't even flinch at the venom in the other man's voice. "That you have a secret route into Miss Waldorf's home via the greenhouse."

"False."

"That she attended a quasi-orgy at your hotel in order to steal documents from your desk."

"Lie."

"That she visited the Five Points for...medical reasons."

"Lie."

"That you're in love with Blair Waldorf."

Chuck's face set like stone. "Did Miss Humphrey tell you that little gem?"

"No, Mr Bass. That's just common observation."

"I commonly observed the two of you at the opera. Why were you escorting Miss Waldorf?"

Asher rocked back on his heels, sweeping an errant strand of hair back into the pomaded whole with his thumb. "Miss Waldorf is a friend. We share a love for Verdi. She needed an escort." With a show of cockiness that was entirely faux – as the young journalist was more than a little anxious around the object of Blair's secret affection and apparent scorn – he grinned at Chuck. "Could it be that the celebrated Mr Charles Bass is jealous? Of me, a meagre journalist. But I forget, the two of you can't come within a few feet of one another without someone having to escape into the ladies' lounge."

He expected Chuck to strike him, and was much surprised when he did not; instead, he directed his fierce gaze over Asher's left shoulder.

"I don't love her," he stated flatly. "And nor does she care for me, in case you felt so inclined to print that under 'innocent speculation'."

"Are you sure?"

Chuck pulled back from the edge of his own contemplation to direct his frustration at his supposed rival. "Perfectly sure." His voice rasped, rough and dark and acidic. "But you will not print anything reported to you by Jenny Humphrey, and you will not delve further into Miss Waldorf's past to substantiate any interest she piqued in you tonight."

"Or?"

"You're a writer. Use your imagination."

The pearls along Blair's neckline reflected milkiness back onto her skin. She had won a few tricks, but her pile of winnings was still negligible compared to Eric's. The ruby on her finger winked as she laid down her cards, pressing the back of her cool hand against her still too warm forehead while the round continued without her, Serena's bright chatter filling Blair's head as she closed her eyes on the room, the party, the image of the door closing and Jenny's triumphant face...

"Miss Waldorf."

She glanced up at him.

"I just need a minute of your time."

A minute of her time was a minute too much.

"Mr Bass, I'm –"

"A minute of your time, Blair."

She bit her lip, held it between her teeth as one of the Jones' raised his head from his cards and then swiftly lowered it again.

"Alright."

He led her beyond the stairs, into a quiet corridor leading to the kitchen. There was no space, hardly any air; Blair was breathing shallowly when he said, "Jenny was trying to expose you to your friend Mr Hornsby. She offered him dirt for his gossip column."

"Oh."

"I told him she was lying."

"Oh. _Oh_."

She knew she ought to be more coherent, more scathing since she had already known, since Asher would protect her, since she could take care of herself, since she was Blair Waldorf. What did that mean, though? It didn't seem to offer security or happiness, only wealth. More importantly, what did his actions mean? It was a sense of possession, she supposed, which made Chuck decide to save her for himself. Truce or no truce, she knew she was his – in his mind, she was his to build up or break down or do whatever he liked with. But tonight...tonight he had acted like a friend, and that was confusing, and being trapped in a small corridor with him with no air whatsoever, or so it seemed, was not helping. Blair inhaled and only smelled cologne, tobacco and scotch. Her thoughts raced in time with her heartbeat.

An end to the physical conflict had only served to cause one in her mind.

"I...thank you." She couldn't tell if he was looking at or through her. "Thank you."

"Blair –"

"Goodbye."

She sped from the corridor with her pretty draped skirts swerving behind her, heels clicking first on floorboards and then marble.

It was becoming more difficult to outrun her feelings these days.

* * *

><p><strong><em>I'm getting addicted to these two. I hope you are too.<em>**  
><em><strong>Thanks to: <strong>_**abelard, CBBW3words8letters, dreamgurl, Nikki999, MegamiTenchi, signaturescarf, teddy bear, thegoodgossipgirl, andi, CBfanhere, isobel, SaturnineSunshine, Maribells, TruC7, LeftWriter224, threewordseightletters, Trosev _and_ Poinsettia._ Asher loves you all. You should take tea together sometime._  
><em>Oi, you on <em>Fan Forum_ and _Gossip Girlsss_! The Gamesome Gallant loves you too._**


	15. Tell Tale Tit

**14. Tell-Tale Tit**

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

_She wouldn't cry, and that frightened Dorota more than the tears she had anticipated. Blair sat still in the bath with her spine curved and standing out like a spar. There were other marks too, lower down, hidden by the oil flecked water. The maid said nothing, only locked the door against Miss Eleanor and lifted a limp arm from the tub to try and soothe its hurt with her own rough fingers and a damp washcloth._

_A bruise on her throat, just below her ear, the marks of a bite and a kiss._

_Tiny red casts across her still small breasts._

_Blair's own nail marks along the tops of both thighs, marking the places where she had tried to cease her own pleasure with pain._

_And still no tears._

_Dorota had raised this girl from the cradle, and now there was an empty woman with her dark hair clinging slickly to her scalp and her dark eyes fixed upon the wall as if it had promised her answers she was now denied._

"Mister Chuck," the maid said flatly, opening the grand front door even though it was not her job to do so. She noted with little surprise that he had grown up well, that he had still had the lean edge of hunger which she supposed made him such an attraction for all the young ladies not as virtuous – or as well versed in his ways – as her Miss Blair. He removed his hat and bowed his head before her like a penitent child, and she narrowed her eyes.

"Dorota. How are you?"

"Miss Blair is not here."

"Yes, she is."

"She is out shopping."

He didn't even dignify her lie with an arched brow. "You and I both know that Waldorf is barely even awake at this hour, let alone in the mood to bully shop clerks."

"Maybe she no want to see you," Dorota returned, folding her arms across her bosom and glowering for all she was worth. No, he would certainly not make an acceptable suitor. Past history aside, he was too well pressed into his fawn coloured suit, a colour which made his eyes glow like a sly cat's. He was too smooth, much too sure of himself with his smirk and his handsome jaw and his knowledge of Miss Blair's habits. He seemed to lounge in place on the step, though there was a definite fractiousness to it; oh, she knew his game.

"Dorota? Dorota, who is it?"

Dorota cursed silently in Polish as Blair came slowly down the stairs in a perfectly nice shirtwaist and skirt. She was all in shades of green today, deep forest in her linen skirt and pale lichen and ivory checks in her shirtwaist. She stopped smartly on the bottom step once she saw who was standing in her doorway, looking as if she had a half a mind to ascend again. Her mouth became recalcitrant, her deep brown gaze wary. Twice her lashes flickered down, and then she tilted her head to one side and raised her chin.

"Bass."

"Waldorf."

"It's early."

"This can't wait."

"You can."

"I come bearing gifts."

The lure was irresistible. "Gifts?"

"Information. Information you'd be interested to hear."

In letting her feet touch the floor of the hall, Blair knew she was ceding territory. Something inside her had turned over to see him waiting there, literally flipped within her, and that was unacceptable. This truce with Chuck wasn't going at all as she'd hoped, and she was still undecided over what she'd felt at Serena's to make her bolt. Closeness, claustrophobia or heat didn't explain the taut awareness that still tingled through her, raising the small hairs on the nape of her neck. She felt angry, almost, that he'd come at all, as if he were deliberately pulling her strings to make her body act against her. At the same time, she was Blair Waldorf and, breathing delicately through her nose, she forced calm through her veins as she knew certain people took poppy tears.

"Come into the parlour," she said shortly, then turned her back to lead him in.

Asher's example was too good to resist, so Blair doctored her coffee nowadays. She added a splash of whisky to the cup – not Chuck's scotch, she'd made sure of it – and turned a blank face to his judgemental one. "What? At least I don't take it neat."

"You don't like it neat."

"Then my coffee is not your business."

Blair cupped her cold hands around her coffee and took the opportunity to smoke her final black cheroot, goading her company with the image of herself she preferred: the prim, top quality clothes and the noxious cigar, the liquor disguised by decency within the porcelain within the circle of her fingers.

Chuck contemplated Blair, Blair's drink, Blair's cigar. He had been the one, after all, to teach her how to smoke, to coach her until she could blow neat puffs like a well-trained salamander. He had brought her champagne when her mother had cut her off, secretly, slipping in through the conservatory and up to her room in the dead of night with a bottle and two glasses she always insisted they drink a toast with first. She was younger than him, less immune, and always fell asleep after a few too many sips. He would lie by her feet or sit on the floor by her head, waiting until the ever energetic movements of her arms and legs shifted the coverlet and she began to shiver. Then he would set her to rights, watch over her – it was when and only when Blair dreamed of her father that he would crawl in beside her, for those were the nights when she cried even in sleep and woke up sobbing. Chuck would bind them together, her back to his front with their arms forming a four handed knot on her waist. He could feel her breathe, feel her body temperature return to normal when he was there to check it. She was always cold then, still recovering from Harold's death with not a spare scrap of flesh on her bones.

Not that she was any less of a china doll now.

"What are you staring at?"

Chuck coughed, adjusted his gloves. "I was wondering how best to lay out this information that you might extend your valuable services."

"My services?" Her lips pursed, forming a small rosebud which, unfortunately for her companion, was no less perplexing or attractive. "And those would be..."

"Sleuthing, sabotage. The weapons of a queen."

"Oh, I don't know," Blair said silkily. "Dress any quean – that's a whore, in case education fails you – up in diamonds and they'll call her a queen. Perhaps you should seek her help, or even Mr Hornsby's. The two of you seem to be fast friends these days."

"You're feisty this morning."

"I'm not in the mood to play, Chuck."

She was such a child, and she uttered his name so thoughtlessly. She said it out loud as if it was habitual for her to use it, to add it to a phrase and throw it in his direction when the truth was that he was 'Mr Bass' to even her friends and less polite epithets in her head. Blair bit her lower lip, twisting the flesh with a moody roll. Indecision was making her sullen, and she would not countenance such behaviour. She would never find peace or, better, a husband and a name that way – so she straightened her spine and drained her teacup, replacing it delicately in the saucer before he spoke again.

"Neither am I." His tone waxed harsh at her sharpness, charm scraping over history and bumping with every step. "But I thought you would like to know that your favourite little quean has got herself an assignation in the park today, and she's as determined as ever to spill your secrets to somebody. Why not this boy toy?"

"I assume you warned her off after Serena's."

"I did. You're not hers to expose."

"I'm not yours either."

Chuck didn't negate, only countered. "For the time being, our past is yours to hide. The truce prompted me to warn you about Jenny."

"Thank you."

"My pleasure."

"You shouldn't have."

"But I did."

"I didn't ask."

"I anticipated your need."

"Enough!" Blair shot upright from her seat, flushing bright with distemper. "Either tell me what you want or go back to Jenny and be _her_ backup!"

"Why, Waldorf." His drawl was formulated specifically to enrage – after all, Hell had no fury like Blair Waldorf scorned. "I didn't know you cared." Lighting his own cigarette, Chuck continued, "They'll be taking a turn around Central Park this morning. I propose we follow them, listen to her prating and, if needs be, interrupt to save your lily white soul from exposure. It should be easy enough to stay undetected, that place is a wilderness."

The butt end of the cheroot smouldered and died as Blair thought. She directed her gaze back over her shoulder, out of the grand window that faced the street, the uncomfortable white light of early morning adding another layer of pallor to her skin. Only her mouth and the Dutch doll spots on her cheekbones still glowed, red hot with exasperation, contrasting with the cool shades of her clothing and skin.

"I'll help you," Blair decided, turning back to the room proper. "But just surveillance. Nothing else."

_Nothing else._

Chuck curled his lip for her benefit. "As if I would want anything else of you. I've said as much before: you held a certain fascination when you were beautiful, delicate..."

"And untouched, I heard you!"

She flamed darker and marched past him into the entryway. He remained until his smoke was spent, watching the light filtering through the window and setting the dust motes alight. It bothered him that he wasn't a true sadist; it bothered him more that he was a liar. Even the cigar fumes mingling with his own reminded him far more of the girl she had been than who she had become. It was the same with his first sight of her that morning, descending the staircase with neat little steps and pearls trembling in her ears: beautiful. Delicate.

Untouched.

Blair barked that she would fetch her own hat and dived into the cloakroom to fetch it, wherein she stamped her foot once and declared herself done. She would come home and read one of H. Rider Haggard's novels, probably _She_. Queen Ayesha always had to be obeyed, after all, even if Blair herself was a queen defied and much put upon.

She returned with a wide-brimmed odious thing that would at the very least protect her from freckles. It had to be tipped forward to accommodate her bun in the back, so her eyes were hidden beneath an errant edge. Blair paused by the door to allow Dorota to tie a large ivory coloured bow beneath her chin, ignoring Chuck completely and walking straight past his proffered arm. They were travelling in an open landau, into which she clambered unaided. The hem of her skirt caught on the steps, and she had to crouch to free it. Chuck's hands were there first, working with or against hers, prompting Blair to wrench away and pull on her gloves.

"Which part of the park?"

"The pond. Nowhere near your angel."

She snorted. "It's just a fountain, Chuck."

Again, like a child, needlessly scornful, ducking her head and concealed her thoughts with her hat.

Jenny was recognisable almost instantaneously, a black blight on the park's lush landscape. Blair was on the verge of telling Chuck how remiss it was of him to let her go out in public without a chaperone when she remembered that she didn't care and closed her mouth again. The gentleman accompanying the usurper was a nobody, that was immediately apparent – his suit was well cut but sloppily worn and his shoes gleamed dully. He had been present at Serena's dinner party, but had only made the guest list as a prestigious somebody's nephew or cousin and, as if to add insult to injury, today he was wearing mustard yellow with a bright red necktie. Blair shuddered, exiting the carriage with an unladylike scramble, all ire forgotten as she slipped into the shadow of a tree.

"Can we interrupt now and have him arrested for crimes against the good people at Lord & Taylor?"

Chuck ignored her, watching the pair with a pensive slant to his profile. "Can you hear them from here?"

"No."

"Move."

They must have looked more than a little ridiculous, alternately crouching behind and dashing between shrubbery and trees, moving closer to the small clearing where Jenny was holding court and the young man was staring avidly at her bosom.

It was hardly the most romantic of prospects.

They ducked behind a small verge, so near together that the brim of Blair's unsightly hat shaded Chuck's head too. The sun was warm where it glowed through the leaves, and there was a sense that picnicking, reading, strolling and not espionage should have been the order of the day.

"This feels," Chuck murmured. "Eerily familiar."

He remained facing forward but Blair turned, very nearly bumping against him as his gaze shifted to hers. She froze as gooseflesh broke out across the skin of her arms despite the clement weather. It was like a mouse caught in the path of a snake: her lips quivered, her cheeks flushed pink once again; his mouth was almost at a right angle to hers, too close, so close that she could have pulled him round and –

"Shut up," Blair snapped, re-fixating upon the lovebirds with an intensity that verged on ferocity.

"But what I think, Mr Smith –"

Jackson J. Smith was a catch, thought Jenny smugly, tucking her hand more securely into the crook his elbow and continuing her social sermon. They had been walking and talking for half an hour about the layout of the part of the park they were not currently in, racehorses and the many Mrs Vanderbilts that Mr Smith seemed intimately acquainted with. He wasn't asking as many questions about her as she'd like, but the birds were singing in the treetops and Blair had left the van der Woodsens before she could see – or stop – Jenny's glorious new connection. He was no Chuck, since no one else ever could be, but his taciturn lack of response every time she talked about herself was comparable and comforting.

"I think that young ladies nowadays exhibit a stunning lack of virtue. There are those girls who pretend righteousness and then chase after every new gentleman or, worse, loves past who have moved beyond them –"

Blair stiffened. One could almost see her hackles rising.

"Calm yourself, princess."

She shot him a black look, but returned to eavesdropping with no further comment.

"And do you pretend righteousness?"

Jenny let out a coquettish peal of laughter. "Why, I would never pretend something that comes so naturally. Back out West, when Daddy was alive, I was never even allowed to leave the ranch without another lady and then a gentleman to accompany us. In your case, however –" She trailed her leather covered fingers up and down Jackson J. Smith's poorly turned sleeve. "I'm sure even Daddy would have made an exception."

"Did you ever meet her father?" Chuck inquired of his companion.

"Never. He and the brother departed for Brooklyn when Jenny's mother left. We did her a favour by not throwing her out onto the street after her faithless matriach."

"You do like your charity cases."

"They're usually more grateful."

"Can you blame her?"

"Yes. Easily."

Their quarry were moving slowly along the avenue, Jenny bowing and posturing to smell the flowers. They would circumvent the actual edge of the duck pond, where water and mud could dirty their expensive shoes, and instead meander a circuit that would, unfortunately, leave Chuck and Blair exposed. Sharing the same thought, they rose and set to disguising themselves. Blair pulled her hat so far down that it was almost flush to her face, and Chuck pulled an inexplicable book of psalms from his top pocket and opened it before his eyes.

"Some spiritual guidance as we walk?"

"No."

"'_Keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings_'." Chuck lowered his voice to the soft burr of gravel, shortening his stride to match the diminutive Blair. "'_From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about_' – not exactly the most cheerful reading matter, but if there's any chance of saving your soul –"

"Need we worry about _my_ soul? Drunkard? Blasphemer? Fornicator?"

"I love it when you talk dirty."

They lapsed into silence, the teasing note falling flat and to the ground. Despite a layer of acid and amicability, both combatants felt like Blair's skin: beneath a smooth surface lay ripples of discontent that ran right down to the bone. She didn't trust him with her interests, he didn't trust her integrity; neither would say that they ought not to be alone together for fear of the other asking why. It was something like a sensitivity to heat, a mute awareness of an unseen pressure, a constant questioning as to whose gaze was where and thinking what and feeling how, when anything other than the pretence of civility was forbidden. He loathed, she loathed, but that had been put aside – and yet it was a truce and not a peace, and so Chuck once again reflected coldly upon her treason, upon her haughty profile and fine lace collar and was rewarded with the death of a few more of his desperately fluttering hopes.

Just once.

Just once more.

Surely that was all he needed to cure this affliction.

A light breeze whipped the ribbon on Blair's hat and the feathers on Jenny's. She had drawn her escort down into a flower filled dell, ostensibly to take in the scents of nature but more likely for the sake of privacy. Blair was oddly transfixed as Jenny's hat tumbled to earth and she looped her arms around Mr Smith's neck. They embraced once, twice, then Blair's sleeve brushed another and she felt herself tremble.

Now she remained the spectator, staying too still and waiting to be caught as Chuck turned his head and gently tilted her hat to one side. Blair shook genuinely, as if with cold or fright as his fingertips brushed her ear, loosening the ribbon. Things were heating up in the dell, roving hands licensed to go below and beyond what was appropriate, but with Blair too were there tongues of fire crawling lazily along her limbs, melting her. She felt his nose collide softly with her jaw, slide down the column of her throat and hover above her clavicle, inhaling the scent of her skin and the pulse beating her blood to bursting beneath. There was a small sting as he nipped at her, but a sharp sweet sting that made Blair's breath gutter in her throat like a dying candle.

Like her dying resolve.

He only wanted her once, once in this cool green place where he could purge himself of this craving and return to viewing her calmly, to waiting and not wanting since the not having was turning him into a beast. He wanted them to make furrows and churn the earth and churn the emotions out of each other. Once would certainly be enough, just as once in the ladies' lounge had been enough...enough for that particular locale.

"I..." The bluebells in the dell were scenting her hair, he could almost taste her heart stuttering.

Jenny felt Mr Smith had taken enough liberties and disengaged, thoroughly disenchanted with the experience. Her adoration for Chuck was so strong and so much purer than this, she shouldn't have to lower herself by imagining him in place of this conquest. Jackson J. Smith was devalued, no longer the magnificent figure he had cut but a few minutes earlier. She knew what a proper kiss should be like, and that had not been it. Even the houseboys had been better than that. Even Blair's drunken guest had been better than that. Still, she wanted Chuck. She wanted the molten, sticky, glowing, running over sensation that Blair had promised was possible. This man didn't inspire anything like that in her. He wasn't worth her time.

"Shall we head across the park?" She suggested brightly, as if nothing remiss had occurred. "I would so love to see the _Angel of the Waters_."

"Your angel," Chuck murmured, calculating the vibrations his words would send through Blair when spoken so close to her. "But for all her pretty charms, there is something alluring about an angel drawn to the dark side."

"Or a devil redeemed."

The former maid nearly stomped as she climbed back up the slope leading back to path, seething with self-hatred and hatred of Blair. Blair was the reason that Chuck was never around, that he had shouted at her after Serena van der Woodsen's party, that she had choked half to death attempting to smoke those demonic cigars. Blair was a whore and Blair was a liar and Blair was everything wrong with Jenny's new life, a life that was meant to sparkle and that didn't. She couldn't give a curse about some damned angel, she would spit in the fountain, she would not not _not_ be a lady for five minutes already. How sickened she was by a world that seemed like a snowstorm caught in a glass bubble: enchanting, but unreachable. She would smash it if she could.

_When_ she could.

The glossy black plumage on her retrieved hat ruffled as the wind picked up.

A little way away, the slack ribbon on Blair's hat came free at long last and blew straight off her head, prompting her to bolt upright and make chase. The fire in her limbs stirred and slowed her but still she ran, pursuing her hat and ignoring her heart and any other parts of her body that might be awake and hungry. Chuck stalked after her with a barely audible growl and an uncomfortable gait, halting at her side on the banks of the pond just in time to watch the hat alight on the water's surface and begin to drift.

"You have to get it back," she commanded.

"What?"

"Dorota will kill you if I get freckles."

He rolled his eyes to Heaven. "Because God forbid there is one flaw on your alabaster skin, or better, soul."

"You're the flaw on my soul," she answered sweetly. "So get my hat."

"Blair –"

"Chuck."

The water looked black where the sun didn't strike it, and so did her eyes: deep and black, deep and deceptive as to that depth, the light falling on the water like tiny sunspots of innocence. It looked warm, that place in her eyes, warm and real, as if a child still lived there and still hoped for better. Chuck went to war with himself for not the first time that day, weighing the cost of suit and accoutrements against finding a way back deeper into the dell and deeper inside her mind.

"Fine," he snarled. "Fine."

No one had mentioned anything about doing so with good grace.

Off came the hat, the jacket, the waistcoat, the cravat, all falling in a heap at his feet. The book of psalms had been lost along the way, but atop the pile went an engraved silver cigarette case and a watch. They shone and ticked respectively, and then Chuck removed his shoes and stood in the damned mud and slowly, slowly, stepped down from the bank and into the water.

It was foul.

It was freezing.

There were ducks.

He had to wade to reach his goal and definitely didn't want to know what he was stepping on – it squished unpleasantly between his toes. Water which had first lapped against his chest now rose nearly to the level of his chin and, as Chuck reached the accursed article, he very nearly decided to drown.

The ribbon had come loose, and now a duck had it.

He looked back at Blair.

"How else am I going to tie it on?"

She was fighting hard not to laugh, what with the filthy pond water and his disgruntled expression and the duck with the cream ribbon in its mouth quacking at this invasion of its territory. Blair dug her nails in beneath her laced flat ribs and bit her lip until it very nearly bled as Chuck and the duck sized one another up. He did genuinely look as if he was prepared to fight, but then, so did the duck.

"I will kill this duck." The burr of velvet and gravel mingled with rage in his voice. "If you need your ribbon back so badly."

Blair felt her knees give way and gasped, "No, no! But you must pay a forfeit! You must say something quite as droll as that, it's too good! I know you're mad, but if you could see you, and that – that –" She bent double and swallowed a howl of mirth.

Chuck did not mock her laughter, or the pretty colour it brought to her neck and cheeks. He moved quietly back to the bank and replaced the hat upon Blair's head, useless and limp as it was. That touch of cold seemed to sober her and she straightened, looking down upon him with absolute equanimity, no more amusement at his reduced state. She did not offer to help him, did nothing more than look. Perhaps he seemed better now to her than the Angel of the Waters, a devil that moved and saved her hat from a fate worse than use in the nest of a duck. That was droll. It was also something he had never expected to do for anyone.

"Something ludicrous," she bade him. "Tell me something ludicrous, since you couldn't save my ribbon."

"I want you back," he replied. "Desperately."

Blair folded her arms, feeling rivulets of pond water slide off her hat brim and down the back of her neck. She smiled slightly, because if she was wet, he was drenched. Strands of hair clung to his forehead and hung in his eyes, dyed black by the water. His shirt clung to his back, and she turned away from the pull of muscle and vulnerable line of his spine.

"Forfeit paid," she murmured, then cast another smile back over her shoulder and laughed aloud. "I'm going home. Don't drown, will you?"

"I'm surprised you didn't drown me yourself," Chuck called as she retreated, blending into the green line of trees and disappearing from sight. He was numb from the water, still too hot and too proud to chase after her and ask for what exactly it was he wanted; helplessly, he sunk beneath the surface of the pond in the hope of terminating the rushes of blood to everywhere but his brain.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Thanks to: <strong>_**Arazadia, SaturnineSunshine, abelard, MegamiTenchi, Maribells, dreamgurl, teddy bear, Nikki999, Stella296, TruC7, Laura, flipped, lulubelle2010, Temp02, PacificRomance, lookinforlove, Poinsettia, LeftWriter224, Kate2008, Seashell _and_ louboutinlove._ Some of you are old and some of you are new, but every word you write means the world._**


	16. Fireworks

**15. Fireworks**

_He came for her in the dead of night: in the blackest hour, in the most secret hour. She felt her breath quicken as jacket, waistcoat, shirt slipped over his arms and to the floor. She didn't have to ask what would happen next, not when he lifted her, blankets and all, stealing her from her bed to carry to his own. She was shocked by the speed, the urgency; she was shocked by the hard muscles in his arms, the lines etched deep in his brow, the desperation and possession and the stirrings of an animal inside her. In that dark place, white crepe lay luminous across her exposed ribcage, the material delicate and insubstantial, clinging like a fairy's gossamer._

_It tore to shreds._

_So did she._

_As it happened – _finally_ – she found herself fixating upon everything, upon every last detail of that _finally_. The rich silk of the coverlet puckered as she dug her nails into it, her eyelids flickered and so too did the shadows in the vaulted ceiling. Their separate joined skins grated together, pushed and pulled and fought and flexed together and she knew that she was good, that she was better, that she was perfection itself._

_That he would never love another like he loved her._

Smiling in her sleep, Jenny rolled over onto her side with the ripe flush of unexploited desire staining her cheeks scarlet.

_**~#~**_

"_No,_"_ she whispered. _"_Don't go. I love you._"

_He turned in the doorway, still fierce and frightening and granite hard in the face but soft, soft where the firelight touched his features. She was still on the hearthrug, struggling to sit up with a sheet clutched to her chest, too young for the sweat on her spine, unready but already taken and now more than ever ready to bare her heart._

"_I don't care what anybody says,_"_ she pressed on, a push and a rush with mouth and tongue trembling. _"_I want you._"

_Silence filled the room once again and he moved back across the floor, slowly, coming to rest on his knees at her side. He was still taller than she, still older and wiser, still so careful as he curved his palms around her fingers and the sheet fell away like an answered question. She, almost pleading, rose up to kiss him and shivered – _yes, this is right, this is where I'm meant to be_ – as her chest pressed against his, her heart pounding inside her ribs but reverberating within him too._

_He still tasted like her._

_Then moonlight striped them both with pale silver bars, and embrace became exploration of an only recently discovered New World, a new liberty, a new shock and a spark and blissful torture in the dark._

Blair woke with a gasp and a roaring in her ears, the muscles in her thighs taut and quivering and unfamiliar to her.

_**~#~**_

_The flower fell to pieces before him, each petal dripping like oil in slow, easy succession. She unbound herself from each dark layer with the expertise of Salome, her equally dark gaze fixed upon his and glowing. She glowed as if the flower were yet growing, as if she were blossoming before him. At last her hair slithered free and she leant over him, and he could smell orange blossom water and lavender soap, and then the perfume so exorbitantly priced that she had to apply with a dropper in the forbidden shadow between her breasts._

"_Tell me you love me_."_ Her lips were already swollen, as alluring as the accompanying white limbs and black lace. Her thumb stuttered over his lower lip, the small sting of her fingernail piquant, like spice._ "_Tell me you need me like I need you_."

_She slid onto his lap, an insignificant weight, smoothing her hands over his face and laying a red hot iron against his skull – numbing his brain, heating his blood, setting it aflame. Skin, he could smell her skin; he wanted to taste her skin. He wanted to hold her and have her until she snapped. He wanted that very moment to spool out into forever, and then forever would be over and anticipation would've eaten him alive and he could consume her too, after all this time, after all this black hot white hot foreplay and ice water thrown on his desires and dreams._

The air turned blue as Chuck swore into the morning light, and then the headboard crunched as his fist greeted the day and split across the knuckles.

_**~#~**_

"Blair Waldorf does not get sick," said Blair Waldorf.

"You have fever," Dorota replied, removing her hand from her charge's pale forehead and pulling the coverlet up to her chin. "I blame wet hat and filthy pond water."

"There was nothing filthy about – I do _not_ have a fever!" Blair swung her legs out of bed and was promptly manoeuvred back in again, her weak limbs manipulated by the capable offices of her maid. "I don't have a fever," she repeated, more quietly this time, though her cheeks felt hot and the flesh beneath her chin was puffy and too tight.

"Have you had fever dreams?"

"How does a fever dream differ from a normal dream, exactly?"

"You dream bright. You dream hot. You dream about past, or magic, you think dream is real..." Noting Blair's sudden fascination with pleating the counterpane, Dorota smiled triumphantly and continued, "I knew it, Miss Blair. You have fever dreams, you are too hot, your eyes shine, your arms ache. You cannot go to the water parade today."

"But –"

"No, Miss Blair."

Since Admiral George Dewey's victory in the Pacific, New York had gone wild for his return that month. A great water parade had been organised, with bunting and boats from every well-to-do family, young men disporting themselves on the river and drinking champagne and orange juice until the ball that night. The parade was bound to be a rough affair, but Serena had begged and Eric had offered himself as an escort and Blair had become quite used to the idea of going. The ball was not yet out of bounds – she had attended a cotillion only last year where she had had to leave every half hour to vomit, and still danced every dance – but the water parade was improper and exciting, and disappointment and the onset of the fever was making Blair's head ache. She turned her face into the pillow.

"I will bring ice, Miss Blair," Dorota promised, shutting the door behind her with a very gentle _click_.

Once she was gone, Blair sat up and searched for a sheet of paper in the drawer of her right-hand nightstand, then took up pen and blotter and propped all on her knees to write.

_Dear S,_

_It has happened, as you prophesied it would after the _'_duck incident': I have a fever and a migraine, and as such am being forced to lie still all day and not read. Make my apologies to Eric, won't you? You know without my saying how mad I am at not being able to come today. The only silver lining to this particular cloud – not literal, of course, as it looks to be a fine day beyond the bars of my prison cell – is that Jenny is not here to crow over me in my weakened state. I'll see you at the ball tonight, God and rouge willing. A little colour in my cheeks is all I need to convince even the eagle-eyed Dorota that I am strong enough to waltz!_

_Best wishes and apologies,  
>B<em>

The aforementioned 'eagle-eyed' Dorota returned with a dish of ice, and Blair sealed the letter and sent her off with it. Sucking on an ice chip without relish, she declined the flannel package of similar chips for her hot forehead and instead returned her attention to the nightstand drawer. After Jenny's excursion into her desk before leaving the Waldorf household, Blair had secreted her bundle of letters from Chuck there, keeping them close beside her and out of sight at all times. When they were locked beneath the lid of the writing desk, Blair felt as if it became an antagonistic object; kept with her spare pen and emergency paper and envelopes in her drawer, they seemed more forgotten things than hidden ones. Now she slipped off the bootlace binding them and fanned out a few across the coverlet. Those she had written were uninteresting, but those he had written, that she had sent back to him after declining his proposal...

_Dear Blair,_

_Is it the Astor girl who's making you jealous? You watch her, then me, then give me a horrible look when I catch you in the act. I would accuse you of not knowing me at all, but I know that won't change anything. You're jealous of me and Elizabeth Astor, and it would amaze you just how gratifying I find that._

_Tell me, Waldorf, do you understand it now? That anger that's somehow to the exclusion of all others? Maybe you'll think twice before putting another Bouchard or van der Leyden beneath my nose. Pleasing your mother is not half so important as pleasing yourself, and I can't imagine envy is a pleasurable emotion for you. They should envy you, after all. You're their queen.  
><em>

_No, I'm not torturing you. That's what you want to ask, but instead you're glaring. Is it possible you want me all to yourself now?_

_You really ought to ask.  
>Chuck<em>

Blair's head was bursting, her eyes were stinging, and she flung the letter from her like something unclean. It floated to the rug as she buried her head in the pillow once again, more sick than she ever had been in her life before, or so she thought. This illness was affecting her oddly, toying with her through fever dreams and cold water-induced flushes and her pulse bump-bump-bumping when she traced the familiar lines of handwriting with a fingertip. Reading had been a mistake, just as Dorota could have told her it would be. She would sleep now. She would sleep through the water parade, and be refreshed for the evening.

She would sleep forever, like a princess, and wait for her true love to come and awaken her.

That would solve everything.

Fairytale beauties didn't even think about Basses.

_**~#~**_

Despite her delicious and sleep-devouring dreams, Jenny was on the verge of being very cheerful indeed. Miss van der Woodsen was going to the parade, she'd told Chuck, and he'd absently chafed his sore knuckles and suggested they go too. She had her very best parasol, which was sheer with a black trim, and a wonderful new summer gown that she was wearing even though it wasn't yet summer. It too was black, but so thin as to be almost translucent, and after much practice she was puffing like a well functioning chimney on her dyed black ciggies.

Serena's polite brother smiled as they approached, but the elder van der Woodsen opened her fan and scowled.

"Serena," Jenny purred, and was allowed the familiarity only because Eric squeezed his sister's arm and forestalled a scene. "How are you?"

"I'm well," Serena answered. She was very fine in a sky blue shirtwaist and heavy walking skirt, both trimmed with white lace, quite picturesque with her large blue eyes and her neatly pressed sibling beside her. Eric was in his shirtsleeves over the kind of rough serge pants that sailors wore, and had clearly been hopping from boat to boat with other young men his age. It was he who addressed Chuck, skating over Serena's refusal to ask after Jenny too.

"Is there no boat from the Basses this year?"

Chuck glanced over the water, at the milling crowds, then back to Eric. "As there's only _a_ Bass, singular, there isn't much point in my trying to man one alone. Good of you to ask, van der Woodsen." That nicety dealt with, he inquired quite casually, "Is Miss Waldorf not with you today, Miss van der Woodsen? It's not like her to miss such an important social occasion, especially when there are so many well bred young men who really have nothing better to do than fawn over her." His tone held the ring of sarcasm, but it was more for Jenny and Eric's benefit than out of a genuine wish to mock.

Serena met his look squarely. "I think you're quite done with trying to get her wet," she said, and Eric choked on his glass of juice.

"She told you."

"She tells me everything."

They were exact opposites, dark and golden-haired, fair and foul of intention, similarly defensive of what each viewed as their personal interest. The insinuation was unexpected from a young lady of breeding but, obviously, she hadn't meant it as it had sounded.

Or she had.

Her scathing expression lessened but a modicum. "Miss Waldorf has caught cold, she's in bed and missing the parade today."

"Will she be alright?"

"She needs peace," Serena enunciated. "And quiet. And to be alone."

Jenny, who had been watching the exchange with interest, had also been changing colour as it progressed. Post Serena's accusation and quasi-fatwa to keep Chuck from Blair, she was a blotchy purple that indicated some point beyond humiliation and rage. Seizing Eric's glass, she downed the fruit and alcohol concoction before hooking her arm violently through Chuck's and marching both away. Chuck himself seemed too stunned to react, as were Eric and Serena – and yet, Jenny's merry call back over her shoulder that they would see each other at the ball later on made sure there appeared to be nothing amiss.

The parade went on, sweeping out the old heroes and ringing in the new. Yet more fireworks were launched into the clear sky, lost against such a vivid backdrop. Eric tucked his sister's hand into that of Carter Baizen, taking his place on the Vanderbilt boat as that Vanderbilt cousin walked Serena a little way, their voices lowered. He then averted his gaze and distracted his fellows as Carter bent his head and kissed his companion full on the mouth to a cheer from the crowd. Serena blushed prettily and made a great show of fighting him off, and Carter sprang back onto a passing boat as if he weren't a Vanderbilt, a Vanderbeck and a Baizen but only a common sailor. Common sailors were allowed to take liberties on days like these, and there were precious few members of the _beau_ _monde_ in the throng to judge even if they had seen.

_**~#~**_

"You are still not well enough to go out."

"I'm going."

"If Miss Eleanor were here..."

"She would _make_ me go."

Dorota folded her arms over her bosom. She very often wished that Blair was small enough to be carried in the crook of one arm and put into a cradle when she started grousing, but winding back eighteen years was harder than it seemed when one revisited old memories.

"Your stays must not be too tight."

"They'll be as tight as necessary, Dorota."

"You must not dance all night."

"I'll dance as long as I can stand, it's impolite to do otherwise –"

"No champagne."

"And refusing hospitality is the height of bad manners!"

"Miss Blair," hissed the maid, her eyes narrowed to slits. "When opening Waldorf-Astoria, first Mr Waldorf's intention was not for Miss Waldorf to die at Waldorf-Astoria all for the sake of a man from the sea!"

Blair laughed aloud and flung her arms around her. "Oh, Dorota! Admiral Dewey is not just some man from the sea...but I will be careful, I promise."

Her temperature had cooled as the day progressed, but Blair was still a little too warm. So much the better, in her opinion; it added colour to her cheeks, the gloss of an Italian painting to her eyes, and her diet of nothing but ice chips had slimmed her to the proportions of a reed. Dorota did not approve, naturally, since Miss Blair was slight at the best of times and dangerously close to looking unearthly when she was ill. She only had to think back to the days after Mr Harold's death, and the hollow beneath Miss Blair's ribs, and the sounds coming from her private bathroom late at night...

So Dorota was almost too lax with the laces, and Blair chivvied her to pull tighter, tighter until she finally declared herself satisfied. In honour of the admiral, she had decided to wear dark blue: a blue so deep in colour that it verged upon midnight with a gleam like starshine. Only Blair knew how much the fabric had cost, and reliving its purchase made her wince. In concession to that sum, she had had it made up very simply. The gown had no adornments, its smooth bodice dropping straight into a full skirt, made up of clear lines with neat cap sleeves just covering Blair's shoulders. Tonight was a night for finery, so she chose a sapphire necklace with stones graduating from the size of a marble to the largest, which was chicken's egg sized and which hung directly below the hollow of her throat.

"How will you lift your head?" Dorota demanded, and Blair laughed again.

On went her gloves, kidskin, and her ruby ring over them. Her coiffure had been in place an hour at least, and all that was left was a tiny smudging of rouge across her lips as Dorota draped a silver mink stole around her mistress' shoulders.

"You are beautiful, Miss Blair," she told her as she crossed the threshold and set off for the Waldorf-Astoria, then added once she was out of earshot, "You knock him dead."

The hotel was full of people, so many that they spilled over and onto the sidewalk outside. Night had followed day with no change in the weather, so it was a sultry and warm with just a hint of breeze, sweet since it had not come from the direction of the Hudson. Serena waited in the foyer, dressed in a salmon coloured gown that warmed her hair and her eyes to yet more vivid hues and a string of beautifully matched pearls. She squeezed her friend's hand before linking their arms together.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"Much, thank you. How was the water parade?"

"Oh, it was –"

Sprawled across a settee with a sour pinch to her lips, Jenny saw Blair's entrance and in an instant had drained her champagne and snapped her fingers for another glass. Blair was so much less of a problem when she'd had champagne, though an afternoon and evening on the stuff hadn't made her any mellower – in fact, the opposite was true. Still, champagne was appropriate for a girl of her age and standing and charms, and yes, she would have another, and where was Chuck when she needed him to sit with her and make her feel better?

"Chuck asked after you," Serena remarked, speaking of the devil just as he appeared in the corner of her vision.

"Did he? Not that I –"

"Blair."

Oh, she was still sick, very much so, and her stomach ascended and she thought she might vomit. He stood before her in brilliant white tie, brilliant because it seemed to be reflecting the light of the chandelier back at her. His hair was pomaded and she could smell the musky scent of his cologne, see the tender places on his cheeks where he'd shaved, the places where the flesh was slightly fairer than the rest. Blair stayed very still and stared, and Chuck stared back at her, for no other reason than a strange kind of greeting: _it's you_. They hadn't been in contact since the duck pond, since his mouth on her neck and the nearly, almost something down in the dell. His gaze flitted from the crown of her head where almost invisible wisps of baby hair curled, down to the sapphires, down the lines of her gloved arms. He fixed upon her lower lip and she bit it quite unconsciously, and then Serena broke the silence and the room came into focus again.

"I owe Carter this dance," she announced, and glided away.

"Would you like to?" Chuck's voice was low, almost a rasp as he cast his arm towards the floor. It was red raw over the knuckles. "If you're feeling up to it, of course."

"I'm much better," Blair told him. "Almost no fever."

"It's a slow one," he replied. "And you can sit down if you're tired."

He took her hand, and perhaps she'd grown used to the fire, for although it hadn't abated, she gained only softness, only warmth from the sensation of her fingers caught between his. His grip on her waist was firm but yielding, a guide and a reminder of the steps they both knew so well; she arranged her hand more on the flat of his arm than his shoulder, since she didn't need to cling that way.

They waltzed, and Blair's bones melted.

"You were at the water parade," she accused quietly.

"You weren't."

"I wanted to be. You hurt your hand."

"You had a fever."

"And a migraine."

"How's your head now?"

She was so intent upon the movement of his lips, upon the black-gold colour of his eyes that she felt no reticence about what she did next: with a small sigh, Blair leaned forward and laid her head carefully against his chest, feeling his heart beating strongly against her forehead and slowly bringing down the tempo of her own, of the blood beating in her temples. "Better," she murmured.

Chuck found himself counting the pale hairs on the nape of her neck, chasing its slender slope to completion on the first ridge of her spine. There was such serenity in her, such trust, and yet his own body was a traitor and wanted to roam further down that spine, loose that hair, hear her heart too as she was surely hearing his.

_Better._

For him, she was better.

And then Jenny waded into the fray like a drunken demon and proved that three, as ever, was a crowd.

"Find your own," she slurred at Blair, thrusting her away and making for Chuck, who thrust her away in turn.

"What the Hell do you think you're doing?" He demanded, seizing her shoulders and holding her at arm's length as Blair flared first with indignation and then shock at her own indiscreet actions. She joined the queue for the door to the terrace, where there would be fireworks, and Carter Baizen took her arm to lead her out. Chuck would've made chase, but he had Jenny to contend with.

"I want to dance," she proclaimed, a perfectly reasonable request.

"Might you also want to be sober?"

"I'm not drunk!" Her eyes filled with tears. "Don't make me go home, don't make me!"

"You need to sleep it off."

"Do I?" And as quickly as the tears had come, they regressed, and her expression was sharp and wicked. "Or do I need to sleep because you need to sleep – on top of your whore, or will it be underneath this time?"

Never had he so desired to strike a woman, to slap her hard across her stupid face in the middle of the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, to drive her away as she had driven Blair away, to lock her in her suite with its strawberry embroidered chairs and burn every one of her stupid black cigarettes. Instead, he gestured at the most senior looking staff member present, beckoning the stately grey-haired man to his side and propelling Jenny towards him.

"Make it your _personal_ business," he ground out from between gritted teeth. "To escort Miss Humphrey back to the New Netherland. Ring for Elise, and tell her that Miss Humphrey must drink several glasses of water before retiring, and that she _will_ retire, and be locked in if necessary."

Jenny grabbed for his sleeve. "I dreamed about you. Think of what you could be if you were free of her! Think of everything you wanted when you came home – when you came for _me_."

The butler began his attempt to remove a squealing Jenny with the minimum of fuss – though she had already caused quite a scene, and even the low rent Mrs Tilt was shaking her head – and Chuck made his way out onto the terrace, pushing past blank faces, curious open mouths.

She was standing alone, and she wouldn't look at him.

"Blair."

He could sense her armour, her ice. She was stoic in profile, chin raised towards the night sky to better observe each flame leap and subside. The short sleeves of her gown were slipping a little off her shoulders, and the sapphires encircling her throat looked black. Only moments earlier, it had seemed as if he could slide beneath her clothes and skin and she would not fight him. Now, with the fireworks painting splashes of red and green across her bodice, she was as closed to him as she ever had been, and he felt the fury of homecoming to this, this caged bird all over again. But he couldn't hate her. He couldn't bring himself to try. She was shaking slightly from the cold night wind, and he couldn't bring himself to try. She'd changed, and so had he. This city, this life – it tainted and healed them both.

Chuck didn't know why he did it, only that he could no longer resist the urge: he reached out, face now raised to the heavens as hers was, silently seeking the kidskin of Blair's glove, so fine he could feel the pulse in her wrist and palm besides. The too delicate material voided beneath his clumsy touch, baring her middle finger almost to the tip; he ran his own finger down and then up its length, from the curved conjunction to the very summit. The muscles in her hand contracted in response, but still she said not a word. Slowly, Chuck matched his each of his fingers – broader, rougher, battered from the altercation with the headboard – to hers, linking them together, not quite daring to bend them and turn it into a grasp.

The five pointed stars of their flush palms in the air couldn't be called a caress, exactly, and it wasn't a handshake or a clasp. It was inexplicable, indescribable, and Blair breathed out in a long gust.

Some people, she knew, called them butterflies.

Within her burned fireworks.

* * *

><p><em><strong>I have a lot of love for this chapter; parts of it were written long before I'd even written the preface of this fic. On that note - I don't like to ask for your thoughts, but I can see how many of you read this fic, so I do know how many of you read and leave without a word. Every comment or critique is invaluable, so please do leave one if you have the time. Also, Mr Duck may return by popular demand...<br>Thanks to:** _**blair4eva, CBfanhere, TruC7, Trosev, LeftWriter224, lulubelle2010, Stella296, cc774, Poinsettia, Maribells, SaturnineSunshine, Amethyst, louboutinlove, thegoodgossipgirl, MegamiTenchi, dreamgurl, Cbnotnow, mroisman, Temp02, Kate2008, Soph, abelard _and_ Nikki999.**


	17. L'Amour Fou

**16. L'Amour Fou**

The ride back to the van der Woodsens' was a steady one, but the still recovering Blair was flushed in the face and exhausted. She pressed her hot cheek against the cool glass of the window and peeled off her torn glove, absentmindedly laying it in her lap; Serena's eyes lingered upon it. Blair closed her own eyes as the carriage slowed down to avoid other traffic leaving the ball and silver mink pillowed her head as she slept, pink and white and pretty and troubled, a tiny frown etched between her brows and her bottom lip tucked behind her teeth. Serena – more white than pink and troubled than attractive – assessed her friend with an even gaze. Blair didn't run, but Blair hid. She hid in sleep, behind closed doors with ice and novels and the minimum of meals. She hid in the Waldorfs' conservatory sometimes, ruining her smooth dress and smooth hands with dirty earth and planting something that would never grow since she hadn't done it right. The question was whether she was hiding now, with sleep, with her tumbled head on her sleek fur and that ruined glove in her lap. Kidskin ripped so easily...or perhaps so very easily in the desire for bare skin.

Rain drenched the house in grey dawn as the girls curled up in Serena's bed, picturesque with their dark and fair hair and their unlikely and even unlucky beauty. It could be a curse to be born with the face of an angel: people were even less apt to accept any devilry from behind it.

As Blair's sleep deepened and Serena's began, still buzzing with thoughts of Chuck and Blair and Blair and Chuck, another young lady not quite of their set was showing her breeding in a suite at the New Netherland. Jenny had indeed been locked in by a petrified Elise, and had set to work destroying the room her captor had paid for. Chuck, Chuck, every facet and flaw and moment with Chuck was what she dreamed of as she roared and struck out at chairs, turned over the vanity, obliterated her own image in the gilded mirror. She'd humiliated herself and him, become imperfect wife material, shown herself as not the girl who belonged with him in California but in the gutter with the other snipes. She wanted to wreck because everything was her own stupid fault, and he'd sent her away when she just wanted to be with him always, always, always...

When Jenny had done all she could do, she washed her face and applied a fresh layer of black around her eyes and to each lash. She used wax, not paint, so her mouth was moist and inviting, and rouged her cheeks only a little. Then she stripped to her bare black corset and stockings, put aside her liquor scented gown for rags and dressed in a clean one.

Then she sat at the remnants of her vanity and waited for Chuck to rescue her.

Two o'clock...three o'clock...five, seven, nine. Her eyelids grew red and puffy and her hands were shaking with tiredness, but Jenny waited for the well oiled click of the door and its opening to reveal he'd come for her.

He had cat's eyes, she'd always loved that. They were slanting and exotic and would have looked amiss on any other face, with any other brain behind them. Now they too were red with fatigue, as if he hadn't slept either, and his pomaded hair was ruffled and his hat was nowhere to be seen. His clothes, flawlessly starched, seemed to be the only thing holding him up. How valiant of him, she thought, to come to make peace with her in such a depleted state. She might play at refusing him, but could she refuse him anything?

No.

"I see you trashed your suite," he said flatly. "And now I'll have to pay for the damage. Bravo. You've managed to put me out twice in one night."

"But you're here," she breathed, inexplicably starstruck.

"I wanted to see if you had to be locked in."

"I wanted to go back, to find you, to explain –"

"To explain _what_?" The door slammed back into place and the wall shuddered, and Jenny shuddered with it. "I dragged you up from nothing, and you repay me by drinking the night away and degrading the woman I –"

"The woman you dragged me up from nothing to destroy!"

"Move," Chuck snarled. "Change, adapt. Or our world will chew you up and you'll be lucky if it spits you back out."

"Our world? _Ours_?" Jenny shot up from her stool so fast that her head spun and she nearly staggered. "_Her_ world, you mean, her world! The world that spat at you and mocked you when you weren't her callboy, the world that doesn't give a _fuck_ who you are inside or what you want, so long as you're fucking who they love and laughing at what they laugh at and wearing what they wear. Can't you see –" She moved towards him, to touch his hand, and Chuck drew back as if she were filthy or freezing. "You're better than that. We belong above that, and we belong together. Chuck, I love you!"

"Jenny." He spoke her name quietly, so quietly she couldn't be sure he'd said it at all. "You don't love me."

"I do!"

"You don't," he repeated, almost kindly. His jacket sat oddly on his slumped shoulders, and he went on, "You were right about my intentions for making you socially acceptable, for bringing you here. I saw ambition in you, that you wanted what Blair has, as did I. As it turns out, I want nothing that Blair has. I don't want to take from her, and it was a childish and unfair impulse to use you in something I myself wasn't even sure of."

"You don't want to destroy her?"

"No." Slanting, exotic; unfathomable, those cat eyes of his.

"I know what you want," Jenny told him bitterly. "And you should know that she doesn't want you. She doesn't care for you! She hides your letters, she puts you from her mind, she throws your flowers into the street! She'll dance with you and lean on you and kiss you, but she wants a society wedding and blue blood babies and you will never, never get inside her and find peace. That's what you want, isn't it? This fuck will erase the old one, she'll say yes, the past will mean nothing because you'll have what you hid for two years in the desert from. You're a coward, Chuck Bass." Her voice was colder than Arctic wastes and the bottom of champagne buckets. "And you'll never have Blair Waldorf, not like you want her. Not if I have anything to do with it. Not if I can stop you having what you want because no one will give me what I deserve!"

Chuck took her chin between his fingers, held that drawn and suddenly ugly face inches away from his. "You deserve nothing," he murmured. "I'll keep you here, because I owe you, but go near Blair again and I will throw you onto the street. Try to blackmail her, and I'll tell every last society mama who you really are. Touch her..." He swept his thumb along the line of her waxy lower lip, one side of his own mouth puckered into an insincere smile. "And I sincerely promise to make your life a living Hell."

"I won't ever forgive you." She stayed still but her gaze followed him back across the room, tarrying, drinking in his presence. "I won't ever stop loving you."

He reached the door, back broad and forbidding, but one glance cast back over his shoulder betrayed pity. There was a pause as he pinched a cigarette between his teeth, lit it and dragged deeply. "It seems probable that beneath that classless black bodice, you have a soul – even a good heart. You should give it to someone who cares." His smoke dropped to the rug, charring the embroidered flowers black just as he'd burnt up her all hopes. Everything appealing had become paltry and insignificant to Jenny, who felt her ribs split and something black begin to gush and corrode inside her. It couldn't touch the image of Chuck, however, who was smooth and fine and whose fingertips were hardened for turning a profit. She captured his profile in his mind as it turned and he left her, imagined brush strokes immortalising what had been – what would be – between them even as the door closed without the sound of the latch and she understood she wasn't his to imprison anymore.

She didn't cry, not Jenny. She withdrew a hairpin, nibbled upon its wicked end and planned.

Time seemed to drag in New York at that time of year, to float instead of swimming. The weather hadn't abated and howled all around the city, clearing the streets of the abusers and hookers who huddled in doorways against the wet. Nevertheless, there was always beauty to be found in the parts of town where smiles were more deadly than a lack of coal or oil or food. There were places where the air and the people were pleasantly scented, where there was no tidemark of grime on their necks where they'd simply stopped washing.

Serena sat on an overstuffed window seat cushion, Blair at the pianoforte with her fingers resting on the keys but not deigning to pick up a tune. Buckman arrived with the morning's usual assortment of letters and cards, but the girls were excused visiting hours on the grounds of Blair's infirmity. Still, since Serena favoured roses in any colour but yellow, bouquets of pink, apricot, white and blood red soon arrived and stood like proud soldiers along the mantel. Blair received what she'd both expected and hoped against receiving: a twisted crystal vase, quite an extraordinary object, filled with pale pink peonies still wet from the rain. Their pallor made them look innocent, soft, so she didn't fear them as she took the card.

_Your –, CB_

_Your –_? Her what? Her servant, her friend, her unacknowledged _inamorato_? The flowers looked to be weeping, sparkling with droplets, and Blair pushed them away from her with a knot in her stomach.

"From Chuck?" Serena inquired.

"He calls himself my 'blank'."

"Your 'blank'? What does that mean?"

"I don't know. He's put a dash as you do in novels when you can't put the word into print."

"Maybe you're supposed to fill in the blank?"

"With what?"

"Whatever it is he is to you."

"An enormously stubborn pain in the ass?"

Serena narrowed her blue gaze into something long and icy and unsatisfied. "He asked after you at the water parade."

"So you said."

"The two of you danced, you didn't even wait for the admiral."

"You were dancing with Carter."

"He took your hand, Blair."

"He and I don't spend time together that way," Blair replied. "And I'm sure he takes the hands of lots of girls. In fact, he most probably takes the hands of and kisses and makes love with lots of girls. It makes no difference what we do together. It means nothing."

"B." Serena pushed the hair back from her temples. Her best friend was a study in contrast: deeply coloured hair falling heavily over her pale brow, thick tendrils curling around her slender neck, face upturned but eyes downcast and focused on the black and white pianoforte keys. To Serena, Blair had ever seemed at war with herself, and raising arms against her own heart was no different - or at least, what Serena assumed was her heart, and not simply history repeating itself with no reason other than to open old wounds and bleed them afresh.

"B," she repeated. "You tell me everything. You always have. But now…now, you're not telling me how you feel. You're not telling yourself how you feel." She broke off, suddenly angry at Blair's lack of response. "Will you tell _him _how you feel?" It was more an accusation than a question. "Because at some point, you're going to have to make a choice. You're going to have to decide if the price you paid to lose him is higher than the one you'll have to pay to keep him."

The fire spat at the intrusion of rain down the chimney, and Blair pulled a peony from the vase and spun it back and forth between her hands. "No price can be higher than losing what I wanted." Her voice had been low, but now it was little more than breath. "I could've been married by now. Had a family. Gone to some place far away from here where my mother wouldn't glare at me because I'd chosen wrong. Someone would've loved me for me, and sent me flowers without stupid, stupid secret messages attached!" Her arm swept sideways in a sudden flare of temper, and flowers and vase fell and smashed on the marble. Serena didn't gasp, and nor did Blair. Both eyed the spreading pool of water dispassionately, as if it had nothing to do with them.

"Carter leaves for the Philippines today."

"What?"

Both girls had taken irons to their hair that morning, and a loose ringlet slipped sideways and concealed Serena's expression.

"The Admiral inspired him." She seemed almost to be thinking aloud. "He wants to fight." Blair was appalled as Serena raised her eyes, and they were brimming. "And he was my friend, Blair, just my friend, and I feel like I've swallowed hot lead. He was a friend who kissed me and who escorted me to places and made me laugh, and I didn't love him, and still I've swallowed hot lead and I don't know if I'll ever see my friend again."

"S –"

"No. No." The golden head shook vehemently. "You're wasting time, B, worrying about what to write in a dash when this isn't even a friend you sometimes kiss. This is Chuck, who drove you crazy, who _drives_ you crazy, who if you're not talking about you're thinking about, or worse, dreaming about!"

Blair turned promptly cerise.

"Write back to him," Serena instructed her gently. "With whatever you want. Whatever you feel. Whatever you know he should know too."

The only peony that had survived was the one still caught between Blair's palms, still being twirled to and fro with its petals trembling. The revolutions slowed as the flower ascended, settling its main body against warm lips, hovering beneath a mercifully freckle free nose as Blair breathed deep, inhaling the cream-rose-citrus-rain scent that would dissipate later in the day. It would be idiotic to write back anything but 'friend'. 'Ally'. Anything but anything that spoke to the way her pulse seemed to rattle in her throat, not beating but racing because it was waiting, waiting for her to make a choice so it could slow or speed. Hers was a hummingbird heartbeat, flitting from yes to no and back when his was so steady and sure and strong and _it's you_ rather than _what do I do what do I do what do I do._

"They say if you...that if you truly care, you shouldn't impose. You should set the object of your affection free."

"Who are 'they'?" An unladylike snort of laughter escaped Serena, and her hands flew upward with the noise. "And do you really believe that? What kind of love is based upon 'I will always love you, you need to let go'? Truly caring means you dig in your nails, kick him in the shins, tie him down and sit on him and do whatever it takes to keep him with you! Truly caring means _you_ can marry someone else, dance with someone else, take the hand of and kiss and make love with someone else, and he won't let you because he won't let you go."

"You think I should kick him in the shins?"

"Yes, Blair," agreed her friend, quite seriously. "I think you should kick him in the shins."

_Newport, Rhode Island  
>1897<em>

_The Vanderbilt cottage, The Breakers, seemed to eat up most of the island. Its upper loggia boasted spectacular views, if one could persuade Mrs Vanderbilt it was quite safe to be up there, and Blair leaned against the balustrade in her white cotton shirtwaist and felt the material soaking up perspiration from her back. The wind wasn't coming right off the water, Mr Vanderbilt said, and so it was hot and clammy and even in her swimsuit Blair boiled. Swimsuits were outlandish creations anyway, when stockings had to rise to the level of the leg holes and collars were wide and trapped sweat in a ring around one's neck._

_Blair wanted to swim naked._

_She just hadn't quite worked out how to do it yet._

"_Waldorf._"

_Blair rolled her eyes – what, was everyone at the Vanderbilts' this year? She supposed they had enough space in sixty five thousand square feet of it for one ignoble Bass to buy his way in, not to mention Countess Szechenyi's soft spot for handsome faces. It was still disconcerting, however, to have him happen upon her when she was deep in such clandestine thoughts._

"_Get off my island,_"_ she commanded, not turning around. _"_Go and summer somewhere unfashionable._"

"_Oh, but that would be rude. I was invited._"

"_So was I._"

"_What a happy coincidence._"

_He slipped sideways and into her line of sight, casually attired in a white shirt and suspenders and khakis, coatless and without an ascot. She wasn't quite sure what one did in such a situation, and found herself irrationally focused upon the part of his neck usually hidden by a tie. It seemed more sensible than looking at his face._

"_Beautiful view,_"_ he commented, and Blair scowled._

"_I came out here for the air, not to talk. Anyway, Mrs Vanderbilt hasn't given you permission to be on the upper loggia._"

"_But Countess Szechenyi did, wasn't that kind? And you didn't come up here to take the air, your eyes are doing that thing where they don't match your mouth. You were gazing out at the most beautiful vista on the island, and you weren't seeing any of it, were you?_" _He lit a cigarette, polluting the still air with unmoving fumes. _"_Tell me what you were thinking about._"

"_Swimming,_" _Blair told him reluctantly_.

"_The ocean is that way._"

"_Shut up._"

_He tried again._ "_What about swimming?_"

"_It's too hot for it. And I'm sick of those hideous suits._"

"_Well,_" _he drawled, as if were too hot for normal speech. _"_Why don't you just swim nude?_"

"_Nude?_"

"_Nude, Waldorf. You'd be a wonderful nude, the spark to ignite my artistic career. What do you say?_"

_Her mouth opened and closed several times, gaping like a landed fish, and then she kicked him in the shin: once, but hard enough to double him up and leave a fierce toe print on his khakis._

"_Break a leg._"

"_I think I just did._"

_**~#~**_

Returning flowers was the height of rejection – jewellery or furniture or cash could be returned, since they turned courting into a transaction, but the return of flowers was a genuine slap in the face. She, whoever she might be, couldn't bear the gentleman's offering to even touch her skin or blight her gaze. The question, therefore, was had he been rejected if she'd returned a single flower?

The stem had snapped and it was only just long enough for a boutonnière, so Chuck tucked it into the lapel of his daringly pale blue walking suit and stepped out into the world with pink blooming against blue, his countenance so dark that even the most conservative of dressers wouldn't dare to question to his pastel coated masculinity. His initial idea had been to visit her angel, to sit beneath the colonnade and read the note that had come with the flower, but he had never seen Blair laugh there, never seen her smile with her mouth open wide and her eyes so bitter brown and chocolate sweet and bright as she ridiculed him.

So he pressed each foot deliberately into the damp grass and churned ground surrounding the pond at the opposite end of Central Park, sliding his thumb so often along the envelope's closure that a sharp little cut sprung from nowhere and stung from time to time. It may as well have been Jenny, needling him with her so-called adoration and her accusations. She hadn't spent time with Blair as recently, or possibly ever, as he had, she didn't know her mind. And anyway, Blair fluctuated based upon the season, upon the cut of her gown; at least, that's what she'd have them believe. She was innocuous that way.

They couldn't see her teeth.

The pond water was as scummy as ever but, as a tip of the hat to tradition, the Waldorf-Astoria's kitchen had provided a bag of bread for their must illustrious and elusive customer. This served to lure the ducks out of their hiding place in the reeds, and they rushed onto the bank and eyed Chuck as if a New York dandy was somewhat of a freak show.

"You look familiar," Chuck remarked to a duck gobbling down crusts in the vicinity of his right boot. This particular duck looked smug, glossy, a strand of white thread clinging to its breast feathers.

There was a small splash as another duck exited the pond and came to join Chuck's companion. Courteously, the first duck stepped aside to allow his light brown mate her pick of luncheon, and something fell from her mouth as she pecked daintily at the bread. Strangely amused, Chuck watched the pair take turns to eat, worrying his paper cut from time to time but otherwise enthralled by the strangely domestic scene. She nibbled while he gulped, nudging her when he was finished as if she might forget him. Irritated, the female ruffled her feathers and waddled away, gliding onto the water with a grace that belied her plumpness.

The male gave Chuck a dirty look. This trouble in paradise was clearly his fault.

When all the bread was gone and the birds had retreated, a strip of white on the mud caught Chuck's eye – or was it cream? He prodded the knotted thing with his toe, in response to which it revealed a tattered silken edge.

It couldn't be.

But it was.

He didn't dare touch it, miraculously clean though it was, only stared down at the remains of Blair's hat ribbon with a strange sense of fatalism. He was meant to be here, it seemed, doing un-Chuck Bass-like things in this un-Chuck Bass-like place, giving bread to ducks and seeing messages in fraying fabric.

"Blair." Her name sounded like a prayer or a curse, hushed and hallowed. "What have you done to me?"

Chuck couldn't help but wonder how long he'd known. Was it only just now falling into place, or had those butterflies tipped him off weeks before? It didn't feel the same as the last time, and that was perplexing. There were the parallels of heat at the opera, scotch in her house and in her hand and the imperceptible tilt to her nose, but this didn't feel as it had when he was eighteen and she was young and fresh and everything. What they'd built together, with charged glances and stolen kisses he was stubbornly refusing to mark down as trite, was something hard. It wasn't airy, it couldn't float on the breeze like a hot air balloon and give joy to all who saw its colours. It was dark and it was private, and it had sharp edges that chose from day to day whether to be cruel or kind. Sometimes they pressed against his windpipe, other times his ribs. Maybe it was a weight that would drag him down in a storm, and maybe Jenny was right and Blair was faking it to wind him around her little finger.

So he'd sent her peonies.

His own cravings weren't potent enough for fuel, not when even Dream Blair asked if he loved her and he couldn't answer. He couldn't run off those dreams, so he might run. Back to California, back to digging mines or digging wells or digging a hole for his head in the sand.

But he had to know: what was he to her, exactly? How did she feel, and how could she cause the small black box with its precious cargo in his waistcoat pocket to burn like an untold secret, like an unfired gun?

A tiny spot of blood had dried along the envelope seal, shredded as Chuck withdrew his card of that morning. There was no change to the 'Your –, CB', only a shadow on the other side which seemed grey against his grey leather encased fingers. He turned it over, and it resolved into full black words.

_I lied. I still love peonies.  
>Your –, BW<em>

* * *

><p><em><strong>The response to last chapter was phenomenal, thank you all for making the effort, especially if you've never reviewed before (and especially if you have, you're old ones but gold ones). Thanks to:<strong>_** blair4eva, Stella296, Arazadia, CBBW3words8letters, L, MegamiTenchi, FatalDestruction, flipped, Trosev, bookworm455, callmebluetoo, Maribells, Blood Red Kiss of Death, LeftWriter224, Maudie, tilly, TruC7, SaturnineSunshine, thegoodgossipgirl, Lyla, cc744, dreamgurl, Rachael, Sophie LeBeau, abelard, Infinitywr, suspensegirl, Temp02, threewordseightletters _and_ Dr. GG.**_  
><em>


	18. To Catch A Butterfly

**17. To Catch A Butterfly**

_where are you where have you gone why won't you come back  
>I miss you<br>why won't you come back  
>I love you I do I lied I'm sorry<br>please don't leave  
>please come back<br>please don't leave me here alone  
>I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry<em>  
>– Excerpt from the journal of BW, December 1897.<p>

Dorota hummed songs from Blair's babyhood as she hemmed her new gown, her costume for the ball later that afternoon. As Jenny hadn't received an invitation to the masquerade and nor could she enter without one, no matter who her escort might be, Blair felt safe enough to wear black. Glimmering crepe overlaid a slender black skirt, a bodice with jet detailing, a train which swept the ground behind her. Her hair had been tonged, brushed flat, brushed back and then curled again. It stood out in an unsightly frizz around her tired face, her bitten lips, her colourless cheeks and uncharacteristically troubled eyes.

The source of her troubles was spread around the room in a stunted rainbow of solely pink, ranging from fuchsia to rose with no variation in species, only shade. She was '–' to Chuck, his reluctant partner-in-crime no longer, and so couldn't bring herself to throw away the flowers that arrived in profusion each morning. He'd transformed her room into a bower, but a bigger problem was the bouquet that had arrived with a pair of ruby earrings studding a single stem, so fiery and faultlessly cut that they'd lain in the palm of her hand for a full half hour before Blair had realised she couldn't return them. They matched the heart cut stone on her finger, which he knew, not to mention the filmy silk of her opera gown. That had drawn her mind back to _his_ fingers, and the earrings jiggled as she trembled in recollection.

Dorota promised they were charmed. "Virtue, Miss Blair. Ruby is a virtuous stone, but also of love. It tells you are ready to be loved, but properly, not sinfully. Remember –" And then her brow had furrowed, and Blair felt as she'd felt upon being caught sneaking glacés at age seven. "God always watching, Miss Blair."

"Yes," her mistress affirmed with a sudden streak of devilry. "So He will strike down any gentlemen who make unchaste advances, I assume?"

The maid momentarily flickered amusement before resuming piety, omniscience and her duster, since Miss Blair's room was never clean enough and the housemaids were, in her opinion, idle hussies.

Now Blair, pausing before the mirror in her polka dotted shirtwaist and simple skirt, was battling different demons to those gentlemen might prove to be under the right – or wrong – conditions. Her fever dreams were gone but the images stayed, taunting her and filling her with a taste for something ever forbidden and supposedly long forgotten. She'd tried...she'd tried _that_ again, imagining his relentless presence, the smell of his cologne mingling with her perfume, her sweat, _their_ scent; to no avail. Moisture budded on her skin and she thrashed until the bedclothes imprisoned her, but the fire below rose and fell with no peak and certainly no inferno. She couldn't go near him, moreover, she didn't dare. In her dreams she was ready and wanton and 'take me now', but in reality she was too anxious about changing the rules of the game to demand satisfaction. Was that what she wanted, truly? Was there more? Was more an option, or was lust the only commodity they had in common?

_Newport, Rhode Island  
>1897<em>

"_Did you do it?_"

_He was standing in the doorway of her room, if one could call a sort of upright recline standing. She was sitting before the vanity, preparing for dinner, just finishing up her toilette, and darted a look towards him._

"_Did I do what?_"_ Blair's dress was a light ruffled lemon, pastel pale as a young lady's dress should be._

"_Were you wonderfully nude?_"

_She fought the urge to throw a slipper at him. _"_No, I wasn't._"

"_Why not?_"

"_Because it's unseemly._"

"_Is it unseemly to eat, too?_"_ Chuck slid into the room like a shadow in evening dress, tracing an improper line across her clavicle. She smacked his hand away, and he smirked. _"_What, Waldorf? I've seen more curves in anatomical drawings._"

"_The only women who let you near them are in anatomical drawings?_"

"_Well, that's not entirely true, now, is it?_"

_Her fist closed reflexively around her earrings, pearl teardrops. _"_My figure is none of your business._"

"_No,_"_ he concurred, then leant down so their faces were level in the mirror. _"_But I don't think Mrs Vanderbilt would like to see how far your ribs protrude in your swimsuit, do you?_"_ His fingers, dexterous to a fault, retrieved the earrings and threaded them through her ears. They swung, milky, and his eyes looked tawny in the twilight._

"_You wouldn't dare,_"_ she challenged_.

"_For you?_"_ He'd slid back to the doorway, a shadow once again since he moved as silently as one. _"_Anytime._"

_She stabbed down with her oyster spoon at the dinner table, tilting back her head and swallowing with savagery. He watched from a few places down, only averting his gaze when the garrulous Countess Szechenyi demanded his attention. Chuck personally hated the saltwater taste of shellfish, it choked him; she swam out beyond the ropes the next morning, out in the ocean, and he realised she didn't fear drowning._

It was an art possessed by a precious few, the ability to pay bills late and get away with it. Those without money to spare would never have been allowed, of course, but those who could pay easily were given _carte blanche_ to do so at their own convenience. It was a lesson Chuck had learned since coming into his fortune, but the one thing he did make sure to pay on time was Jenny's keep. This was necessary both in order to maintain the illusion she was his ward, and to keep her sated and away from him. He gave the hotel enough for her and her enough for a 'comfortable' existence, which ought to have been more than enough for a former ladies' maid.

"That's Miss Humphrey's suite for another month, sir."

"Thank you."

Jenny pressed her face against the grille of the barred elevator doors as Chuck, resplendent in charcoal with purple facings on his coat like an emperor, exited the building without so much as a glance back over his shoulder. Her lips were numbed by the cold metal, uncomfortably close to being cut, but the closer she could be to him, the better.

"Soon," she promised, then handed a roll of bills to the attendant and ascended to her suite once again.

Chuck walked east, back towards Fifth Avenue, ignoring the cabs that whistled and bawled their wares as he passed. He had a very particular costume in mind for Serena's masquerade that night, and there were still pieces to be collected all over the city – but no matter, Arthur would fetch them, and he was at his leisure to take a stroll, maybe take lunch at Sherry's. He had hardly been seated, however, when the other chair at his table in that smoky, steamy little place – it was always filled with gentlemen at lunchtime, who sweated and coughed and smoked like chimneys – was filled by none other than Asher Hornsby, a vision in shell pink with a black necktie and hat.

"Mr Bass, how are you?"

"I'd be better if you left," Chuck replied darkly, and the Gamesome Gallant laughed.

"I forgot what a charmer you are, Mr Bass, and speaking of: how is my dearest Blair, and will you and she be attending Miss van der Woodsen's party tonight, and can I quote you on that?"

"Miss Waldorf is well." The waiter scooted over with two beers, apparently requested by Asher, and Chuck took a sip for something to do. "And while I assume her friendship with Miss van der Woodsen will mean her presence tonight, no, I'm not escorting her, no, that doesn't mean you can use her to weasel your way in, and if you do quote me on anything then I'll make sure to break every one of your fingers. That may make holding a pen rather difficult."

They sat in silence and drank their beers for a minute or so, since it was warm and the bottles were chilled and there was something wonderfully pedestrian about doing so without a glass. Then Asher piped up, "But will you be making any copy for me tonight, that's the real question. 'Oil Baron Engaged to Society Belle'? 'Beauty Weds Bass'? They love to read about the two of you, you know, even if it's about the fact that you happen to wear the same colour on the same day. Do tell me, won't you? Or else she will."

"The intricacies of our war games are too complex for a prole like you to fathom."

"So you're at war?"

Chuck cursed himself. "No."

"So you're not? There's nothing rotten in the state of Denmark?"

"Please desist with the literary allusions."

"Wouldn't you rather I had it from you than second or third hand? You can control what I say that way, I'm utterly your puppet."

"No."

The other man's white teeth shone as he leant forward a little across the table. "You're an interesting gentleman, Mr Bass. You seem content to keep her secrets, such as they are, not publish them, not dig for them, when my first commission for her was to find you out. Yes," he continued, as Chuck's expression shifted from exasperation to a lack of interest belying his lack of knowledge. "She wanted to know what you'd been up these past two years, who you'd seen, what you'd done. I was asked for dirty dealings, but her request was rather specific: women, mentions of her name, where you were and what you were doing at certain times. More like a jealous wife than an enemy."

"She's not –"

"I know, I know." His look became serious. "But I like Blair, and I won't have her hurt."

"You played escort to Jenny Humphrey before her eyes."

"That was for your benefit, not to mention the little bitch's." He said the word quite casually, though it was the antithesis to his cheerful demeanour. "If you thought I was about to ruin Blair Waldorf, you would have one of two options: if you hated her as Miss Humphrey does, you would play along or, if you cared about her, you would confront me. You chose the latter, Blair avoided being done to death by slanderous tongues – though if you ask me, she's more of a Beatrice than a Hero – and Jenny Humphrey gained nothing more than a few hours of my company."

"What did I say about literary allusions?"

"Calm down, Wentworth, I'm a writer, it's what I do."

Chuck lit a cigarette with a kind of ferocity. "What did you call me?"

"Wentworth, naval captain, Jane Austen. Was refused by the woman he loved, disappeared, made a great deal of himself and then returned and was rather unpleasant to her. Luckily for sweet Anne, her charms won the day and he married her."

"I don't see the connection."

"Or you're pretending not to."

They eyed one another levelly, and it was no surprise whose head dropped first.

"I'm not proposing to her tonight, Hornsby." There was a trace of tiredness in Chuck's voice as his veal finally arrived, neatly arranged atop a mess of overcooked vegetables. Had the journalist delayed his meal over this interrogation? The potatoes seemed to suggest so.

"Does that mean you will another night?"

"Surely if I were going to propose to Blair Waldorf, the first person to know would be Blair Waldorf."

This seemed to conclude the conversation; Asher got up to leave.

"One last thing."

"Which if you quote me on, I'll break your legs."

"There is a record –" He consulted his notebook. "Of quite an exemplary ring, purchased by a Mr C. Bass in the November of 1897 for the incredible sum of one thousand dollars. There is no record of that ring being returned or sold to another dealer, and you have never reported it stolen or lost. That must have been all the money you had at the time," surmised the Gamesome Gallant, coolly so he didn't seem pitying. "Where's the ring, Chuck?"

Chuck raised his eyes from his untouched food, striking and slanting and fathomless. "No comment."

Only after the subpar food had been eaten and the beer drunk did Chuck allow his hand to stray towards his pocket. There it was, a heavy weight for such a small thing, balancing out the gold hunter-case watch in the other. His father's watch, Blair's ring – wherever he went, he was accompanied by the ghost of things that had slipped through his fingers just as he'd begun to understand them.

_**~#~**_

Gloves, two pairs: one black elbow length lady's, one black wrist length gentleman's.

Masks, two: one silver, one red and black.

Dress, one: black velvet with lace and crêpe de Chine overlay.

Tuxedo, one: red.

Shirt, one: black.

Waistcoat, one: red.

Bowtie, one: red and black.

Slippers suitable for dancing, one pair: black.

Shoes suitable for dancing, one pair: black.

The blade was laid against his skin, close enough to raise the hair on his arms. He caught sight of his saturnine reflection in the shaving mirror, inscrutable even to himself.

Her scalp screamed as the hair was pulled high and tight, wound in a waterfall of curls that dripped over one shoulder and rose in a dramatic pompadour above her forehead.

He laid layer over layer, building himself up with fabric and bright and dark, smoothing back his hair, tying the sculpted mask over his face as the light guttered and died.

Pink dusted her cheeks, red her lips, black her eyes, precisely defining each lash. She sparkled, and she stood taller than usual, and crimson glittered in each earlobe.

They both tried the same thing: a similar movement with similarly poor results, the absence of fulfilment as they stared at their own concealed faces, thought of each other. Those hazy, wicked notions considered the curve of cheek and jaw, the plush line of mouths, strong and fragile shoulders, a thousand contradictions that made them complete opposites. Still, as the heat of the night increased and became stifling, unheard of for the time of year, they were both discontented, trapped in their own bodies, stretching their own skins.

One left early.

The other arrived late.

The ballroom was veiled to the rafters, gauzy fabric in red and purple hues billowing like the sails of a ship. Wide open French doors enticed in a breeze which swung them a little, depositing their cargo of petals onto the heads of those below like fragrant snow. Blair entered tentatively, casting about in the array of gorgeousness for Serena's golden head. Swirling back and forth across the floor were harlequins and angels, Caesars and Juliets, aristocrats and prince-paupers in tattered robes with the promise of glitter beneath. Even the rich didn't like playing poor on a night like this.

"B!"

Serena had no obvious character but was gilded from head to toe, a deep yellow dress and matching ornamentation glowing against her hair and polished skin. Her mask was made up of slender lines, sparkling where they bisected her face and adding a sunshine gleam to eyes which were painted to shimmer in the night.

"I'm so glad you came," she exclaimed, wrapping her arms around her best friend with a modicum too much force; Blair turned her gasp into a laugh and drew away, smiling.

"Does Lily approve of you turning her ballroom into a bordello?"

Laughter bubbled forth from Serena, such a bright sound that several faces turned her way. "Turkish harem, actually, and she chose the colours. Now, you have to promise me to explore - we have champagne and punch, though which is toxic and which is weak you'll have to work out for yourself. There's a fire eater in the lesser parlour, which is standing in for the ladies' lounge, and a contortionist in the games room. Masks come off at midnight, and couples have to have found one another before then in order to leave together."

"Anything else?"

"Yes." Her hostess' lips curved in a cat-in-a-creamery smile. "Don't forget the devil, will you? He's waiting for you."

Blair didn't need to ask who was waiting for her in the darkest corner, lounging beside the slightly ajar door of the ladies' lounge, wreathed in the shadow of flames from the fire eater. She wore black and he wore black and red, a cruel twist marring the sensuous line of his lower lip. Raising her mask to her eyes, Blair shrunk behind the silver tracery and hurried in the opposite direction.

What was meant to be an evening of drinking and dancing had become a genuine arcane event, a pagan festival of hedonism, evidenced only too well as Blair paused before a makeshift booth with a heavy brocade awning. Eric was seated behind it with a laurel wreath in his sandy hair, the brown of his eyes almost entirely consumed by his pupils. His table was bare but for a small pot of something clear and golden, which he stirred now and again with a silver Tiffany spoon.

"Blair." He welcomed her with a dreamy smile. "Serena has countenanced flying tonight."

"What does that mean?"

"Kneel down."

She did, for something to do, knowing full well that the ladies' lounge was out of bounds until its guard post had been vacated. Eric's movements were liquid, his expression beatific as he dipped his little finger into the pot and leaned towards Blair. It burned as it brushed the tip of her tongue, an intimate action that was strangely not intimate, more the teaching of a sage to an acolyte. The taste was putrid, with a side of sweetness like garbage rotting in the summer.

"What is this?"

"You'll see." He tapped her lightly on the nose. "Why don't you go and dance, lovely B? Then you'll see."

There was a ripple in the air like a heat wave as she stood, suddenly aware that her pulse was roaring in her ears. Why couldn't anyone else hear it, it was so loud...oh, they all looked wonderful! All their colours were bright and clear and vivid as she glided towards the dance floor, slipping into the arms of Jonathan Whitney without question. He was flying too, the whites of his eyes brilliant and lustrous; they giggled together as they turned, much to the amusement of the other dancers who were either inebriated, drugged or halfway to being there. Everything was rapturous, everything made Blair laugh, and everyone was beautiful. She pressed her mask to her eyes and the cool metal was delicious and made her skin bubble, which too was delicious. Why couldn't everyone hold her like Jonathan was? Why couldn't she fly all the time? He passed her on to Teddy Astor, drunk on punch this time, and they whirled around until they were both dizzy. Oh light, oh light – the chandeliers were shattering light all over his face and hers as the tempo of the dance kicked up, tipping over into a new rhythm with Serena's voice swirling around them.

"Don't you know how to dance a volta?"

"It would help if anyone had danced one for four hundred years," Blair remarked to her partner, tugging his cat mask further down over his forehead. They remained on the spot, twirling as Serena and a still floating Eric showed them the steps, as graceful together as so similar a pair could be. There was a pang there, though, because Eric wasn't Carter, and Serena would have to dance the rest with someone named Gabriel who spoke with a strange accent.

"Blair, I –"

"Princess." It came as a purr from just behind her, an accusation that made her tingle. "Care to dance with a poor devil?"

"But I'm not a princess," she told him, turning. He wasn't bright, he was all dark and without light, burning black like an inverse sun, drawing her in, drawing her closer. She could feel his roar too, just like hers, sounding too loudly and drowning out all else as she announced, "I've come as a butterfly."

"What have you had, butterfly?" Chuck inquired silkily, gripping low down on her hips where they fit his hands even through her skirt. "What have they given you?"

She slapped him, and he dragged his teeth over her gloved palm as it shifted. "You're being very rude."

"I am."

"And I didn't even say yes to dancing with you."

She was petulant, flushed, hot, sticky, exquisitely stripped of her inhibitions with the look of white pages behind a black velvet cover. The rubies in her ears spread teardrops of scarlet over the company as they began to move tentatively in the volta, then faster as the drink and drugs in their systems took hold. Staying still, standing so close, Blair's chest was pressed against Chuck's. Her décolleté swelled gloriously and her tongue moistened her already swollen lips, and her lashes darted up, down, up, down, up. He was sober but his blood was hammering, locking them in a prison of legs and arms as he imagined her everywhere: on the floor, up against the wall, splayed on the damask couch in the ladies' lounge, every piece of glassware reflecting them in a carnal tableau.

"Dance with me," he commanded, and she denied him no longer.

The volta was from the Renaissance, a forerunner of the waltz, but not the way these people performed it. When the ladies were lifted into the air, they came back to earth by sliding down their partners' bodies, skirts hitching up to reveal ungodly glimpses of slippers and stockings, their hands trapped above their heads. The execution made Blair dizzier and dizzier, scorching her skin every time Chuck squeezed her wrists a little too tight, not letting her go, not letting her reach the final frontier of her feet on the floor again. He wouldn't let her have the pleasure of a move on her own, anticipating her, holding her on the edge of something neither of them said out loud. Nobody was talking, there was no longer any music, and Blair still fancied she could hear everyone's pulses, picking up and slowing according to their attraction to their partner. She was stricken with electricity, with an intensity that almost burned when he traced a path down her bare spine and she arched, unconsciously leaning into him as another wave of the drug made her see spots. His eyes, his black gold eyes were eating her alive. She wanted him to eat her. She wanted him to strip her down until she was just bare flesh screaming, struggling, scratching at the back of his neck as she was now.

More warm air stirred the canopies, and petals – so well preserved that they were fresh with dew – fluttered down.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Now. _Please_."

She slipped out of his arms, darting towards the punch table for a glass of something noxious for Dutch courage. _What do I do what do I do _had an answer. _You do this_, she told herself, draining a glass of something that tasted vaguely like fruit. _Give into your desires, your needs. Give into him. Give in, give in – wait..._

There was a lurch in her stomach and a voice in her head saying she needed to drink more, much more of the watered down stuff that was rapidly dimming the drug. What had she done? _Drink_. Rubbed all over him like a cat in heat? _Drink_. Let him feel her respond, let him touch her bare skin, let him see? _Drink. Drink. Drink._

Blair was cold as she ran towards the terrace, for one reason alone: what horrified her was that her sentiments had come to the surface, not that she had them at all. This was horrifically familiar, all this fire and ice, all these satin soft feelings, the sparks in her limbs, the lingering dreams, the hunger, this heartbeat, her heartbeat, her racing heartbeat...

Chuck saw her rush towards the French doors and followed without a moment's hesitation, knowing that he'd pushed too hard and that awareness had dawned and that he wasn't going to let her run from him without a word, not this time, not ever again. The black lace overlay of her skirt trailed behind her, catching on creepers, but her pace did not abate. Only once they were deep in roses spilling out midnight perfume did she halt, breathing hard enough for him to catch her by the shoulders and consummate them with the pressure of his mouth on hers.

The butterfly gasped in response to this onslaught, and her little heart fluttered beneath her heavy dress. She felt the heat of the Devil's lips, of his tongue, of his intention sear through her, exchanging secrets and nectar between him and her, and she was afraid. Here they were again, as in the beginning, Satan in the garden with a curious young woman who didn't yet understand the line between lusting and loving or how desperately he wanted her. He told her with his grasp, with his unyielding grip on her shoulders, fingers straying to caress the column of her throat. He told her as he pushed back his mask and hers clattered to the ground, two pairs of eyes jet black in the starlight. He told her by taking umbrage with her mouth to kiss her nose, her flaming cheeks, her trembling eyelids and her lashes and her brows, over and over until her mouth felt ripe and weak with longing, and her tongue entwined fiercely with his when they met again. All these things he told her without speaking, and desire curled golden in the butterfly's breast and beat against her ribs with its own wings.

"I can't..."

"Don't torture me," the Devil murmured, so close to her treacherous mouth that even his words made her lips part and ache. "I'm dying."

"I _can't_!"

Blair flung herself backwards and almost bounced off the trellis, no longer a butterfly but a debutante with a pounding heart and a pounding head and a cry inside: _I can't be feeling this again, I can't, it's not possible, I can't, I don't, I won't_! She very nearly shouted the words aloud but all that came out was a sob, and she clamped her kid encased fingers over it to shut herself up and bolted for the gate. Her skirt dragged behind her and her hair was mussed but she didn't care – all that mattered was that she was out of that garden and as far way as possible from the love that seemed to have found her again, against all the odds, and which was dragging her under to drown in an ocean of despair and bliss.

* * *

><p><strong><em>The volta is a Renaissance dance anachronistic to 1899, but it was sometimes used in later years as an invitation to sex, being so utterly scandalous. The drug Eric gives Blair isn't real, but is based on a mild hallucinogen and aphrodisiac which breaks down in the body with the addition of water - I would guess it to be a mixture of alcohol and magic mushrooms.<br>Thanks to: _aliceeeebeth, nonnie3201, Stella296, Kate2008, Blood Red Kiss of Death, LeftWriter224, SaturnineSunshine, blair4eva, little. miss. flirt. bird., ggloverxx19, flipped, Krazy4Spike, Trosev, Agent Twinkle Toes, tilly, CBfanhere, abelard, BellaB2010, bookworm455, batgirl2992, CBBW3words8letters, MegamiTenchi, Poinsettia, L, Seashell, Temp02 _and_ TruC7.**


	19. In The Bleak Midwinter

**18. In The Bleak Midwinter  
><strong>

"It is good you've come, Mr Hornsby, it has been like living with Miss Emily Dickinson."

"Dear God, she's not taken up poetry?"

"No, Mr Hornsby. But Miss Blair has taken up reading more of Mr Haggard's novels than is healthy for her eyesight, and she will not have her ice or chocolate..."

The door banged cheerfully open. Blair, who was swathed in a flannel nightgown, a wrapper and long stockings, shrieked. Asher, who was dressed in a wonderful beaver skin coat with a high collar, smiled. "It's snowing!" He proclaimed, and bounded into the room without a thought for its occupant's modesty or the exquisite silk carpet beneath his boots. Dragging back the heavy brocade curtains, he stared into a whirl of falling white, inhaled as if it had a scent, and then continued, "And I've been reliably informed that today is your birthday, so get out of bed and wash that silly expression off your face. Then I can buy you something pretty with my miserable wages, and we can have tea and champagne after."

"I don't want tea and champagne."

"No, you want a birthday present."

Blair sank deeper into her nest of comforters, pulling a lace-edged shawl up around her ears. "I don't want that kind of present."

The Gamesome Gallant appropriated a corner of the bed, making sure not to crush her dainty feet or yank on the covers bundled around her throat. "I know you don't, my poor dear girl, my source inside Miss van der Woodsen's party and my romantic soul –" He let out a sigh. "Tells me so. But when my heart's desire eludes me, I find that a stunning fox fur bought for me by a stunning man and plenty of champagne ease the pain for a time."

"It's not...not painful." She toyed with the fine border, the elegant sweeps of pattern. "More that I find my feelings crystallising into something that frightens me. Something that can't be, not ever."

"Forbidden love." He sighed again. "The sweetest, the sharpest."

"It's not a game, Asher."

As tender as could be, he drew out her hand from where it was knotted around the counterpane and pressed a kiss to where it curved into a fist. The dull cast left her eyes as they followed the movement, the light touch of his lips to the centre of creases in her flesh. "I know, Blair." His own fingers curved over that place, sealing the caress inside her skin. "And you must know that I am your spy, your gallant and your friend, if you ever have need of me. I don't care what you've done or who you've been a whore for."

Blair ducked her head and smiled. "I was nearly his only a week ago. I would've let him have me on the floor."

Asher shuddered. "Don't do it. Terrible carpet burns."

They laughed together, only slightly awkwardly, and then he cast his gaze around the room and remarked, "Did someone celebrated die in here I'm not aware of? Or have you been lying abed hoping to die of hunger pangs and passion? Whereof stem the peonies?"

"He sends them every morning."

"Even in a snowstorm –" For the latest offering had arrived that day, not a touch of frost marring its petals. "He sends you peonies. My dear girl, _I_ would be his whore for such attentions. And I'm sure more will come later, to exult in nineteen years of such a goddess. So get up, put on something warm, and come with me."

She dressed behind a Chinese screen in silvery violet velvet, sable hanging from the wrists and wrapping her neck in a jet coloured cowl. For fun, Blair left her hair outrageously loose but tucked it beneath a black Cossack hat, pulling a few tendrils free around her ears to create the illusion of a coiffure beneath. Asher kept up a running commentary on the items Dorota retrieved from the wardrobe, on the shortcomings of housemaids these days, on how much he admired Blair's former nanny. Dorota blushed like a schoolgirl and muddled her charge's multiple layers of underskirts, but at last the picture was pronounced '_parfaite_' by the Gamesome Gallant and they stepped out into the wasteland of Fifth Avenue.

"Where to?"

"Marsden the furrier, of course."

Mr Marsden – who had been Mr Mendel when he'd arrived at Ellis Island – was a short man with a bold nose and olive skin. He himself travelled to the Yukon to bring back pelts, which were then cleaned, treated and perfumed in his workshop before finally being put up for sale in the shop. Blair loved the furrier's, loved the feeling of being enclosed by luxuriously deep pile on every side. She especially loved the fact that, unlike so many other such establishments, Mr Marsden didn't mount the heads of his animal benefactors on his walls. Such displays were gruesome, in Blair's humble opinion, and unnecessary.

"Miss Waldorf, Mr Hornsby," the furrier hailed them, a trace of accent in his voice that no one could ever place. He hurried out from behind the counter to bow over her hand, to tut over the sable on her sleeves and to send his assistant flying into the back for some wax to prevent water damage.

"It will be as smooth as ever, I promise, no residue, no stickiness. My father himself taught me the recipe."

Asher beamed like a benevolent papa. "What do you have in that's new and glamorous, sir? I brought the lovely Miss W here for a birthday present."

"You must accept my congratulations." Mr Marsden avoided the other man's eyes but returned his smile. He was shy almost to a fault, and it was an endearing trait in a world of brash salesmen. "And a twenty percent discount, in honour of the day." He shuffled backwards with a click of his well polished heels. "I will fetch my newest, for which I had to send out on commission, even I could not retrieve such a thing myself..."

The young man who waxed Blair's sleeves brought with him strong Turkish coffee with enough sugar to make one's teeth ache, but it was a cold day, and the warmth was comforting. Asher wasted no time in adding brandy from a hip flask in his pocket to all three cups once he'd persuaded the assistant to join them, and though Blair preferred the whisky from his other pocket, they were all rather merry by the time the furrier returned, bringing with him something heavy wrapped in many sheets of greased paper. There was a slight smell of blood, indicative of the fur's freshness, and yet more paper was laid out on the floor before them until, with a sigh that was almost of completion, the great pelt was unrolled.

It was a beauteous thing, thick plush sealskin in pale gold, pocked all over with black splotches like the mistakes of many pens. Mr Marsden held it up to his customers' cheeks, allowing them to feel the velvet touch, the slide of hair this way and that, supple in both directions. Blair buried her nose into it and forgot about the carnage of the creature inside, since it was such a gorgeous thing; she didn't bat an eyelid over the price, but her guilt swelled at the recollection of 'miserable wages', even more so when her companion requested a muff, mittens and a matching hat. They set to with the chalk then and there, under the Gallant's directive: 'no, it should extend all the way up the forearms', 'above the brow and the eyebrows, she should be able to see', 'I assume you have the finger measurements on file?'

There was no smoking allowed in the shop, so once receipts had been acquired and the diminutive furrier had made good on his promise of a discount, the journalist and the beleaguered maiden stepped outside for a festive cheroot.

"How's your bad mood?" Asher inquired, blowing a smoke ring which was almost immediately swept away by the wind.

"It's a wonderful gift, Asher," Blair answered him without actually answering his question. The tip of her nose was glowing, and her fingertips were dangerously close to the smouldering end of her cigar, seeking the heat.

"I take that to mean your thoughts are still with the dark knight."

She raised an eyebrow.

"He's hardly snow white and chivalrous, is he?"

"And you're hardly gallant. Your pocketbook, however, has done me very good service today."

He nudged her companionably as a miniature avalanche slithered down from the awning. "Come along now, shameless. Let's go to Delacroix's, the French never mind intoxication in the middle of the day."

The streets were almost free of carriages, unheard of for New York. Maybe it was because the weather had come down so suddenly, or maybe it was because the snow was so was heavy, but Delacroix's Restaurant was still crammed with people, chattering away in French and English and even German in one corner, where two heavily mustached men were tucking away soup if their lives depended on it. Since the time of the Revolution, this had been the place for émigrés – wealthy, well spoken émigrés, naturally, with money enough in their aristocratic purses for the restaurant's exorbitant prices – and many a comte and duchesse would come to this place for the comfort of their homeland. American royalty was more welcome still, so a table was found for Blair and Asher the moment they stepped through the door.

"Your speciality brioche," Asher commanded. "And don't worry about tea, just some of your good champagne. No _eau de toilette_, by which I mean piss."

The waiter seemed to take it as read that his wishes were Miss Waldorf's, and so returned swiftly with a bottle of champagne, two glasses and enough still warm brioche for two. The sight of it was enough to make one's mouth water: smothered in almond paste and studded with nuts, glazed until it was sticky enough to attach to the roof of the mouth and not come off until it was scraped free. It was assumed too cold for an ice bucket, so the champagne was warm, but it was fizzy and gay and multiple toasts were made to the day of Blair's birth.

Blair however picked at her half of the brioche, occasionally snapping off a blanched nut or a frosted corner, but primarily she drank, and couldn't get drunk. If anything, she became more maudlin and sober of mind with every sip. She knew that most of her brain was occupied with Chuck, with bolstering her failing resolve where he was concerned, but some memory she'd tried very hard to forget was pressing at the edges of her psyche and demanding to be obsessed over.

"Is it time to go home, dear girl?" Her friend asked after an hour of little or no conversation.

"Yes, please."

He left her at her front door with a chaste kiss on the mouth, the kind of embrace between children that meant nothing. It froze her ready frozen lips for a moment, and she watched in silence as his beaver bearing figure walked back down the avenue, down a long stretch of white sidewalk, reaching a cross street just as a sickly amber sun parted the clouds and drenched him. It would be so easy to love someone like Asher, if someone like Asher could love her in return, or even to live with him as brother and sister under the guise of a married couple. How nice it would be to have days like this, where she was spoiled and petted and made fun of in a gentlemanly manner. It would be so nice for her heart to feel as it had before, and not as it did now: the tough outer layer peeling back as on an orange, revealing susceptible succulence beneath, segments which could be tapped for their sentiments or split open to spill.

Dorota was waiting in the entryway, and Blair had not even had time to take off her coat before she announced, "There is present for you, Miss Blair."

It was wrapped in marbled paper by a feminine hand, probably before it had even left the store. Pulling apart the package, a book bound in blue leather fell into her hands: _Persuasion, a novel by Jane Austen_. At a loss to who or where it had come from, Blair traced the gold embossed title and opened it, pulling back a delicate sheet of tissue to reveal the first page, just before the title and printer's mark.

_To you, on the occasion of your second anniversary._  
><em>'It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.'<em>  
>– <em>Voltaire.<em>

_Persuasion_ gripped tightly between her palms, Blair stormed out the door.

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

_There was desperation, white in his face, black in his eyes, determination burning like a pilot light alongside as his hands slid up the smooth glide of her legs, mapping her anatomy and committing it to memory: the slimness of shin and calf, firmness of thigh, neat curve of small buttocks, the silken skinned secrecy of hidden sex. She quivered at the masculine roughness of his hands, the hands she'd imagined there too many times to count, when they were on her face or throat or shoulders. They slipped upwards to caress her waist but returned as lightning cracked the sky into jagged white pieces and Blair cracked too, feeling herself being parted like a flower and closing her eyes in case she was supposed to. Her own scent was foreign to her, and he was so gentle with his rough, unworthy hands; she might've cried but instead bit her lip hard as he blew air into now bared flesh, warm and humid and swelling slowly like dough rising._

_Chuck said nothing. His eyes were closed, and she was waiting on him._

_That was why she saw everything that was wrong, and undignified, and shaped by Heaven's hands._

_First he nuzzled her, as softly as a cat to an untrained kitten. That didn't spark but tickled, curling upwards to curl in her belly in a single strand of something. Then he kissed her, there between other lips, and that was a spark that was red and blue and that she recognised. It was on numb, useless flesh that he kissed her, but then her heart began to beat in the place above his mouth and he kissed it, just once._

_A star, a shooting star. Her knees crumpled and then locked again._

_There was warmth seeping between her thighs now, shameful, taboo. It didn't seem so to Chuck, who made a sound like pain and stopped kissing. That wasn't right, it had been lovely, those shooting stars, further threads weaving together in her muscles and forming a fretwork that tugged. That tugging made trickles which fell slowly, enriching the scent in the room as Blair began to feel cold and empty once again._

_He lapped, and she nearly fell._

_Nails bit into the window frame, hers, into her thighs, his, the syrupy sweetness that had come in on a roll of thunder stripping back restraint and modesty and 'no' and 'goodbye'. His tongue was insistent, pushing, searching for a place around that place with the pulse, the place that was a small and swollen and white hot when Blair's fingers slipped down, when Chuck kissed her hand and then forced it away. He consumed it, enclosed it with warmth and pulled a little, but a little was all it took. Each press of the flat of his tongue, each pull like a drag of intoxicating liquor or tobacco was a creamy sort of pleasure that made Blair incapable of moving as more poured into her, catching inside her limbs, pulling on her muscles so she shuddered and spoke and sighed without meaning to._

_Then came his teeth, and it was no longer creamy but aching, bursting, sharp, a fever that had to break because if it rose any higher she'd die, surely, though she was so ready to die, she'd die over and over because every heartbeat coiled her up more, tighter and tighter, pulsing like a wound spring, like the drumbeat between her legs, like the way everything was pushing outwards and upwards and oh, he was inside her, and his tongue was begging and licking and on the verge of reaching something too good –_

"_Please, please, please._"_ Tears streamed down her face, over her snarling lips and clenched teeth._

_His hand came up, and gave a cruel little twist._

_Blair exploded. She knew she did as her skin peeled off her flesh, her flesh off the bones, her nails cracked the paint of the windowsill and lightning struck again, her, her, her. There were jolts and there was thunder when he smiled against her, taking pride from her pleasure, tipping her into an aftershock that sapped her spine of strength while she was still rising and falling, beyond the reach of anything as delight painted her white with the light from the sky. When her knees did give out, he caught her; she was as trusting as a child with her swollen lips, the darkness in her eyes overtaking even the darkness that surrounded him._

"_Please?_"_ She asked, when her back was against bearskin and the room was spinning._

_She had never seem him naked before, nor he her. She, however, was quite unconscious of her small rounded breasts with their pebbled nipples, flushing darker with arousal, still trembling slightly when she tried to think and breathe. He was different – he was glorious, in a strange way, lean but not pretty and not heavily muscular and not made like her, not with flower buds and parting petals but with hair darker than the hair on his head and face, sometimes, if he forgot to shave. There was a hard line where she had only softness, and even the motion of her eyes drifting over it seemed to tantalise. Chuck lay on top of Blair, in all her debauched, mindless, animal beauty, and she mewed as her breasts were pressed flat against his chest and shifted, rubbing against him in search of friction._

_Still he said nothing._

_She would say yes._

_He knew it._

_It was just a light touch where she opened into the world, a familiarity that caught and wanted to stay but didn't dare. He moved slowly, not daring the assault before she had begun to wriggle and try to take more. This was agony, he thought, and hellfire, and death, groaning aloud as he moved into her for the first time, only an inch, only a moment. Home was being held like that, held that tightly, held in the valley which led to her heart. A little further, and he felt the stretch, and she the hurt, but she edged towards him on her bare back as if soothing his need would take the pain from her too. It would tear them both, he was sure, so Chuck lowered his head, and drove his fists into the floor, and crawled all the way inside._

_Blair cried out, one single, reproachful cry._

_Then her nails were digging into his shoulders, and they began._

_Afterwards, in nightmares and waking dreams, he couldn't remember a place where he hadn't kissed her, licked her, bitten or scratched. He sucked the skin on and around those blushing nipples until blood broke its barriers and dappled her pallor red. He nipped at her neck and she pulled his hair, and he drove into her hard enough that he wondered if he might go through her and straight through the floor beneath. Time passed fast and slow, meaningless while she drew blood on her inner thighs trying to numb herself with her own nails. She came, he came, once and again, a milky resin coating them both that could be a child, that could be five or ten or fifteen children by the time it had happened again, again, and they were both squeezed to pips and now rocking together, tenderly, moving only leisurely so as not to throw one another up high once more. He was sure it was home, being tended there, being needed there so badly that when he pulled away she wailed and he kissed the birthmark on the inside of her arm by way of apology. They couldn't pull apart by the end, though he was spent and vulnerable and still within when the rocking ceased and she came undone one last time, as easily as if it were the most insignificant thing in the world._

_Then he felt her stop gripping, and they parted without a sound._

_The End._

_Fool._

_She didn't call him back at the door, though he could tell she wanted to. He thought she wanted to, silly, beautiful, perfect, beloved little whore so saddle-sore that she could barely sit up to watch him leave her. He prayed for her voice every step beyond that door with his throat raw and his eyes hot and dry and prickling, with the taste of her in his mouth, on his skin, with his tongue thick and useless for persuasion. The sharp edges of the diamond cut his hand, he bled onto it; this was better, this was pain he understood. This was a pain he would take with him, wherever he was going, to the place where he could turn love into hatred and where the girl already icing over beyond the door, already freezing inside, already screaming his name in silence would become obsolete. Shit on his shoes._

_Nothing._

_But so soon after he had loved her and she him in return, she was still everything, and all he wanted to do was die and feel her hands stroking his face, to kiss her one last time._

_He would give all he had left for one last time._

Chuck was waiting when Blair slammed the door of his suite behind her. He was ready for the book hurled at his head, spinning through the air and hitting the window pane without shattering it. He was prepared for the fact that she was dazzling, pink cheeked and pale skinned with her mouth burning scarlet like an allegation. He'd ruined her birthday, he was fully aware of that. The only thing he hadn't made provision for was her snatching her hat off her head to throw at him too, and a wave of lustrous, almost black curls coming to settle around her snow dusted shoulders. He remembered her hair as well as he remembered the contours of her frame, its scent, its texture, and it disarmed him to know that he could wind it around his fist and inhale the crushed flower perfume if he only stretched out.

"Take it back," she hissed. "What you sent. What you meant. Take it back."

"I take it you don't agree with Voltaire."

"How dare you."

"I dare. You did too, as I recall."

"I was a child."

"Hardly a child."

He knew she was thinking about it, about the wanton purrs and her legs wrapping around him to force them closer, toes sweeping his calves with every flow and ebb. She hadn't been a child that night, when he was naïve enough to act like one by taking her.

"I want you to take it back," Blair said quietly, becoming deadly as her rage slipped from fire into ice. "That night may have happened, but...we're not like Wentworth and Anne. I didn't wait for you, and I know you didn't for me. You came back in the hope of lording it over me, not winning me over and going back to what we used to be. I want you to say you don't believe we can be that way. I want you to tell me that all of this is just a game. It's been a long, elaborate game, coaxing me to...to care for you again, to care so you can reject me like I did you. I want to know that it's over now I know too."

Chuck examined the object of his affection, his erstwhile hatred without the kind of passion which had clouded his head when they'd made love together, without the iron tang of blood and anger when he'd bitten his tongue on her name too many nights in California when other girls were tangled around him and seeking his release.

"When we were young, I asked you things," he stated calmly, without blame, without bile, without challenge. "I asked what would make you happy. You wanted banned books, cigarettes, alcohol, to stay up all night; now I'm asking you again." He met her gaze with a steady, molten look, bright and ungodly and dark, untested gold. "I'm holding onto your wings, butterfly, and I don't know if you want to get free. You're indecisive, you're self-centred, you're arrogant and impossible...and I love you."

She closed her eyes to block out the inexplicable euphoria, to tamp it down and deal with it later when she could decide if euphoria were an acceptable emotion and if it was something she should have or not. There were red checks and balances on the insides of her eyelids.

"I meant it, Blair," he said, as if she'd questioned him aloud. "With all my heart. So I need to know."

"Need to know?"

"If you want me to let you go." She found herself fixating on his hands, on their square dependability and sure fingers, on the places where she knew they were rough and would rasp over her. Everything was so much harder to block out with her eyes open. "Or if you'd like me to stay where I am, holding onto you." Then his voice lowered, sinking into depths that made Blair's stomach churn. "Because I'm not going to wait around and play the gentleman any longer if you're mine."

She was still intent upon his fingers when they came into play, catching her chin and raising her face to his. They stared at one another, drinking in the sights and the sounds, and then he laid his lips against her forehead and she shut her eyes once again. A moment of calm in a snowstorm, they stood still, figures within a whirlpool within glass, not saying, not choosing, not showing. It shouldn't have ended, that moment. It should have spooled out into forever.

It was not far back up the avenue, but it took Blair what seemed like hours to walk home. Her feet stumbled over one another in the snow, her still chest offering no rhythm for them to follow.

She went into the conservatory, where her peonies had been relocated and plunged into dark earth, out of season, out of mind.

It must have been a trick of the light that she thought she saw roots.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Possibly the hardest chapter I've ever written, emotionally speaking. I hope I wasn't the only one with heartache! Thanks to:<strong>_** dreamgurl, Maudie, Trosev, L, flipped, ggloverxx19, Blood Red Kiss of Death, Krazy4Spike, Nikki999, Kate2008, thegoodgossipgirl, ggoddess, TruC7, Stella296, Laura, CBfanhere, SaturnineSunshine, LeftWriter224, Sophie LeBeau, C'est Magnifique, Cest Magnifique _(again!)_, manhattanACM1812, Temp02, Poinsettia, MegamiTenchi, Maribells _and_ aliceeeebeth._ I hope you'll forgive me for holding out on the M-rated content for so long._**


	20. The Brightest Day

**19. The Brightest Day**

Yet there the roots were, as diminutive and powerless as she herself felt. She extended her hands out before her to touch, ignoring their trembling, stroking one slender white line in the soil with her fingertip. It had been that feeling that had prompted Blair to pull back instead of fall forward into his arms, to cut and run as she always did, back out of Chuck's suite and sink down in the elevator with a blissfully silent attendant. She was so afraid of him, of them both that she had gone to the ground in the best place she could think of: here, among the silent plants, while snow still swirled outside the window and gas-fuelled braziers kept the more exotic creepers warm. Here he had confronted her all that time ago – had it really only been a matter of weeks? – in the secret place where she'd once torn flowers from the soil and destroyed it with her tears. Nothing grew in certain flowerbeds, in the certain places where salt water had hit the earth and poisoned it. How could something as innocent as tears be toxic? Blair didn't know.

She supposed that meant they weren't innocent tears.

It was late afternoon by the time Blair had recovered enough to stop staring at her implausibly growing peonies. She was due for dinner at the Bouchards' that evening, but without a doubt it had been cancelled. It wasn't cold in the conservatory or in the house, and her heavy gown was beginning to stifle. Wearily, she climbed the staircase to her bedroom, violet velvet train dragging behind, still damp from the snow. The sables would have to be laid out somewhere to dry, and perhaps the dress too; with a sigh, Blair clambered into a yellow muslin gown, something old and soft that strained a little across her bust and which had probably been donated by her grandmother, once upon a time. Eleanor detested such heirlooms, but her daughter was glad of the familiar scent of roses that clung to the fabric and tickled her nose.

"Dinner, Miss Blair?"

"No, Dorota."

She moved past the maid with a smile that existed only on the mouth, nowhere else on her face. It was only when Dorota entered the room that she noticed a change: the bearskin hearthrug was covered with discarded clothing, shrouded and hidden from sight.

She made no comment.

There was a queer lightness in Blair's limbs as she descended to one of the house's many kitchens. She'd been forbidden to enter as a child because her mother had forbidden many things which made no sense, and the great black range still seemed ready to grow a dragon's tail and belch fire at this trespass. In one corner of the room was a small wooden door, damp and swollen from exposure to steam, so poorly kept that Blair had to set her shoulder to it before it would open. A loamy, rich smell oozed out, crawling around the kitchen and bringing with a blast of stale air.

She took the steps down into the wine cellar.

In this other forbidden place, bottles gleamed like jewels in their specially cut racks. Harold had ordered them from France, and imparted to his only child the importance of storing wine correctly. "They must lie flat, and snug," he'd said. "So they don't bump one another, or make one another cold or hot. Like horses, Blair-Bear. Each bottle is a separate creature, and you treat each according to their individual needs." The taste of claret was a shock, surprisingly dry when it looked ripe and full-bodied, and burgundy was deep enough to drown in. He told her all about champagne, and how it gave the worst headaches. Blair missed her father like an ache in the gut down in that dank place, and she quickly removed a bottle of sweet ruby red port from its alcove and clattered back upstairs.

The next place to visit was her father's study, almost arctic in atmosphere since there was no fire and no lamps burning. The bookshelves were arranged alphabetically, as best suited a practical mind, and _Candide_ was on the very bottom row, along with a few other tomes by Voltaire. This was the thinnest, however, so Blair drew it out with a strange sense of guilt at disturbing her father's sanctuary and at letting herself be inspired to read by Chuck. He too was like a gripe in her belly, a pain that could be so wonderful if only she'd stop swallowing it and let it grow enough to consume her.

A swallow of wine passed her lips before she'd even passed through the door.

Night fell early with so much white in the air, shedding a strange purple light where sunset and snowfall mixed. It streamed through the wide conservatory windows along with the light of a crisp frosty moon, mingling with the stained glass panels and painting the room with a moody rainbow. There was no obvious seat, so Blair perched on the edge of a planter, lifting the port to her mouth perhaps more often than was necessary while she stared at the book in her lap and considering opening it.

_It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge._

Did those words lie between these pages? Should she disdain to read them again, since she herself knew what was virtuous and what wasn't? Everyone said that Blair Waldorf was such a good girl, the girl to follow, the girl to be. If that were the case, however, why did Blair waste so much time regretting her actions? If she was always right, and as perfect as they all promised her she was, surely she ought to be above reproach. Surely there shouldn't be pieces of her life, puzzle pieces, that when she looked back didn't quite fit the picture.

Or was that the price of perfection?

A draft blew from somewhere, somewhere low down and far off; Blair's fingers closed reflexively around her bottle. Taking care to move as quietly as possible, she rose from her perch and tiptoed across the floor, making for the source of the wind with a decanter of port as her only weapon. While it wouldn't stop a man with a gun, someone close enough for a knife or a fist could easily fall foul of glass smashing over their head. And then, thought Blair daringly, she could tie them up and interrogate them – perhaps not interrogate them. Perhaps just tie them up and gag them, change into something more appropriate and wait for the authorities to arrive. She could sent Dorota running and shrieking through the snow, picturesque in her apron and white cap, or –

"Chuck."

There was snow in his hair, on the shoulders of his black coat, and he seemed quite as surprised to see her as she was to see him. He wasn't even wearing a hat, and his ears were deep pink. There was something very defenceless about those ears, so Blair directed her gaze away from them and down to the floor.

"You're in my greenhouse."

"I am…aware." Even with her head down, she could sense he wasn't looking at her either. "I didn't think you'd be in here, that's why I didn't come to the door. I didn't…" He halted on the edge of admission. "I came to return your hat."

"My hat?"

"It's an article of millinery, you wear it –"

"I know what a hat is!"

He had to be watching her now, observing the blood pooling in her cheeks and the way she shook her head at her own too vehement reaction. It was childish in any case to examine her own feet, so Blair raised her face and tried to look at Chuck evenly, avoiding anything that made her want to pull him over to the braziers and make him warm himself. His earlier kiss seemed to linger on her forehead somehow, as if seeing him had reignited a dying flame. The pain she felt in his presence was almost a physical cramp now, so much so that she wrapped one arm around her body and made as though it were for warmth. He returned her gaze so steadily, like wasn't a question between them, like nothing had changed earlier that day and he hadn't said what he'd said and altered the course of everything. Her own reflection was visible in his eyes, one half of her face lit and glowing smoky gold, though his irises appeared more black in the moonlight.

She could see emptiness.

That was why they were so black.

"You're freezing."

"I'm quite –"

"You're freezing," Blair repeated. "And not a little wet, it seems."

"It was snowing," he replied unnecessarily.

"It's still snowing."

It hung in the air, the sense that the other shoe would drop any second, that he'd hate her for running and she'd hate him for asking. Until then, she told herself he was merely another charity case to add to her roster and, since he'd come as a favour, she owed him her help, and nothing else.

"Come with me," she said, and turned her back on him.

It had been another innovation of Harold's to have the gardener's room backing onto the conservatory, meaning it would always be heated without the additional cost of having to build a place in the garden and heat that. The gardener having married one of the housemaids and moved upstairs to a private apartment in the attic, his room was empty, sparsely furnished but clean, containing only a small chest of drawers, a neatly appointed bed and a few lamps, which Blair lit with matches from the nightstand. The walls flickered yellow, a deeper shade than her dress, the hem of which she drew back as Chuck passed by and gave her an inquisitive glance.

"There's a few fresh shirts in the drawer, Mr Tyler's wife makes his now. The water's gone all the way through your coat." It had, turning the heavy wool a darker shade of grey. "I'll go. Or turn around. Or go."

"Neither is requested." There was the edge of amusement in his voice. "But turning around is recommended for the good of your sensibilities."

Blair turned, pressing her still hot cheek against the plaster wall and trying not to listen. There was the heavy tumble of something large, his coat, and then smaller sounds which indicated the removal of a damp shirt and waistcoat. Finally came the slide of a drawer opening, a pop and a click from stretched shoulders and then a, "I'm decent."

He'd changed. California had changed him. Building himself as a man had changed him. Beneath a slightly faded flannel shirt, there were the contours of muscles in his arms and chest, delineating his stomach and eating away the leonine leanness of two years past. It made him seem much taller to her, this Chuck who might have dug wells with his bare hands for all she knew. He'd definitely done something, even it was just heaving girls out of the way to go on to the next one. Blair bit her lip on a remark or, more likely, a gasp. The realisation that he'd changed physically was accompanied by another: that he'd changed, full stop. If a boy could become a man and seem so empowered, so dominant in regards to his presence alone, could it be that the very essence of him had changed too? Not the most important parts, the nested parts, the parts given by family and experience…but maybe in the parts that only saw the pretty and guileless and sparkling parts of herself, not the ones he'd warred with of late – her ruthlessness, her bitterness, her fear and cowardice.

The wine in her hands sloshed, and they both unfroze.

"Drinking alone?"

"Apparently."

Chuck bent, extracted a flask from the pocket of his discarded coat and mock saluted her with the liquor inside. The smell of scotch was almost overpowering as he took a drink, and Blair sat down on the edge of the bed when her tongue revolted at the thought of its taste in her mouth – when it didn't come by way of someone else's, of course.

"That's a pretty dress."

"It was Grandmother Waldorf's."

"I'm sure she appreciates your revival."

Blair swung her legs onto the bed, slipping them beneath the counterpane to counteract the chill that swept through her when he was like that – cool, and sarcastic, and unfeeling, and unreachable. Yes, technically she was in bed with a man in the room, but it was Chuck, who could have taken advantage of her a dozen times already and who had returned her hat, now resting atop the chest of drawers. The half bottle of port she'd swilled while waiting to act upon Voltaire was making her drowsy, and so were the guttering lamps, and so was the warmth of the greenhouse. She wanted to push her face into the pillow and ignore him, but he was there and he was watching her again, silently, his jaw and cheekbones shadowy and his mouth a mystery in the forgotten gardener's room. There were moments when she could almost believe he'd forgotten he loved her, and moments when she was absolutely convinced of the opposite.

This was one of those.

"I have a proposition."

"I'll say no."

"Blair."

_If you're mine._

"I'm mine," she almost mumbled, before deciding upon, "Fine. What's your proposition?"

"By the time I get back outside, the temperature will have dropped sufficiently to turn the world into a slick of black ice. Seeing as I like myself too much for a broken limb, I propose that – if I promise to leave as you as pure and perfect as you currently are – we make use of this bed for a few hours of rest. I wouldn't even require your presence, except that you've had a lot of port and I'm guessing you'd prefer to remain down here than go upstairs and face the tender mercies of Dorota, who will give a lecture on the evils of alcohol and what exactly God thinks of you."

"Do you promise?" They both knew what she was asking.

"I promise."

"Then I agree to the terms of the proposition. If you break something, you'll never stop blaming me for it."

"I may threaten to tell your mother and the papers."

"And use it to isolate me from my friends."

"And throw it in the faces of my fellow suitors."

A beat of silence.

"Go to sleep, Chuck."

The mattress depressed beneath his weight on the other side, and Blair closed her eyes. She was curled up facing the east wall, the blankets tucked around her body, effectively forming a barrier between her skin and his. They smelt a little of earth but they were clean, and it wouldn't do her any harm to sleep for a little while on this subpar servant's mattress. Chuck didn't seem to have the qualms she did about bodily privacy: he lay in a long lean line on the opposite side of the bed, loosely draped in linen, facing the west wall and a miniature of the housemaid that had obviously been abandoned when the room's occupant had married original.

"He must have cared very deeply to move upstairs for her."

"It's a few floors, not an ocean away."

"To move upstairs for her," he reiterated, sounding the words out oddly in a manner Blair couldn't comprehend. "Is a great deal for any man. He declares himself so in her thrall that he would drop everything and go when he couldn't stand being without her any longer…no matter what his reason for living down here, far away from her in the first place."

"He put himself on the line," Blair stated. "But then, she did too."

"How so?"

"What if he was meant for the conservatory? What if he would be stuffy and cramped and miss the flowers when he was in the attic? Then she'd feel terrible for dragging him to a place he hated, for making him stay just because he loved her."

"He wouldn't care if he loved her. He wouldn't care if she made him live with the horses, so long as she passed by him every day and he could see her light."

"Maybe she wasn't light. Maybe she was flawed and wicked inside."

"That would be light to him."

The space between their bodies was warming at last, and an even hotter tear squeezed from the corner of Blair's eye and slipped down, down her cheek to disappear into the pillow.

"Go to sleep, Chuck," she bade him in a broken sort of way, and then did so herself.

She'd always been an excellent escape artist.

_Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue  
>1897<em>

_She wore black, even though her father had hated the colour. Too grown up for his sixteen year old darling were black dresses, black hats, black fans trimmed with feathers, but there was nothing else to be worn whilst in morning. A high black lace collar choked Blair, and she habitually ran a finger beneath its edge and gulped down the lump in her throat. Her mother said it was unladylike to cry in public, in front of those who came to the house to cluck and pay their respects over Harold Waldorf's grieving widow and child, so Blair kept swallowing. Everything about the drawing room made her want to scream, everything about her tightly pulled back braids, everything about the red puffy flesh of her eyelids._

_Another left, and she pulled bloodless lips back over her teeth in a savagely false smile._

_Then he arrived, and she couldn't even bring herself to blush._

"_Bass."_

"_Waldorf." He looked down at the flowers between his hands, laid them on the sideboard as if realising their uselessness. "You have my condolences, of course."_

"_Of course." She couldn't care about being polite to him, not when he'd seen her at her basest and now at her lowest, without eye or lip paint or even rouge on her sallow cheeks. "Sit down. Please."_

_Chuck took a seat across from her, in a matching Louis Quatorze chair which seemed too spindly too take the weight of anyone but a tiny, grief stricken girl. Her eyes were enormous, doe-like, sunk in swollen sockets. He recognised all the expressions which slid sluggishly across her features, not bothering to conceal themselves – he knew them well. When his own father died, everything had moved slowly, though he had drowned in alcohol and women rather than face up to the reality of absence. Blair seemed to be drowning in herself, if anything, twisted by the creatures in her own mind until nothing would matter ever again._

"_You won't die of this, Waldorf," he found himself saying, as fiercely as if she'd insulted him. "I swear."_

_She didn't move, only curled a little further in on herself. But her lashes flicked down, and the lines on her forehead smoothed out, though her hands still twitched around the collar of her dress as if it hurt her._

"_Peonies." The word came out as he was upon the verge of an exit. "That's what you brought, isn't it? They grow them in our greenhouse. I thought they wouldn't do well here, since they come from so far away."_

"_They don't appear resilient," he replied. "But they are."_

"_Are we still talking about the flowers?"_

"_Yes, Waldorf. We're still talking about the flowers."_

Blair made a minute noise and stirred, moving listlessly from side to side. She was snug, and her limbs were weighted down, and the blankets had come loose and snaked themselves around her. There was the feeling that she ought to shift but this was comfortable, and then she tried to raise her chin to relieve the cramp in her neck and struck something hard but yielding, eliciting a muffled groan.

"Don't move." His breath was warm against her ear.

Her head was tucked into the hollow of his throat, so close that each exhalation reflected back at her from almost humid flesh. They were so entwined, her hands caught between them, splayed across his ribcage, pressed against his heart. It had seemed so steady when she'd caught its rhythm before, but now it was hammering quite as fast as hers. She felt his turn, the slight coolness of an inhalation when his cheek was resting atop her hair. Her fingertips, still tentative, traced patterns on the worn gardener's shirt he'd been prepared to shed his own for if it meant he could stay with her another minute, another hour, while she turned her back and acted as if he wasn't handsome to her, as if he wasn't cryptic and tragic and everything but easy; as if he wasn't the lighted candle to her moth.

As if he wasn't everything.

"I should be going."

But he wasn't moving either.

"Goodnight, Waldorf."

"Same to you, Bass."

She nestled closer, by way of a goodbye, then drew back a little to inspect him. His hair was a mess, as hers must be, far away from the world of curling irons and pomade and other people who solved these kinds of problems. There were his eyes again, black-gold, liquid in motion, extending tendrils or fire which entered through her wide black pupils and consumed her. Her eyelids flickered shut, then open, closed again as another wave of melting-sugar-heady-caramel-boiling-over feeling ate up the parts of her brain reserved for self-preservation and self-restraint. His nose bumped gently against hers before there was just the idea of lips – that they were there, that they were oh so close – and then the truth of mouths touching, melding, opening to one another as if they were sharing secrets. The cold had chapped his skin and hers too, so it was in no way the softest kind of kiss, but it was sweet enough that Blair followed it even after it was gone, moving automatically to continue even when he pulled away. She initiated the next, curving her fingers over another pulse point on his neck and tugginh on his bottom lip, dragging him back to her, eliciting a sound from Chuck that was nearly a growl. Her other hand came up, tangling into the hair at the nape of his neck while he returned the favour with hers, eliciting tiny stings from her scalp that electrified proceedings. They stayed that way for who knew how long, just kissing, just tasting, just shifting against one another until the friction began in earnest and Chuck rasped, "Stop."

"No."

"Blair…"

"No!"

"Why don't you decide do as I say before Grandmother Waldorf's dress gets destroyed off and I decide for you?"

Blair toyed with her neckline. "I love muslin."

"I love heirlooms."

"I love you."

She was so, so close to swallowing it; but once uttered, the weight of the world seemed to whoosh upwards and into the ether. The euphoria from his own utterance of those three significant words was like a flood inside, like a dam collapsing, like the filth of years being washed away because she'd never loved anyone the way she loved him, not even the him she'd loved as a girl of sixteen. This was passion, the kind that made you glow and that burst forth from you and blinded everyone. This had a greater worth than diamonds, real estate, oil and gold and old Dutch names: all. This was the sum total of every novel, every opera, every glance back over the shoulder, every touch, every tear, every tremor: all. It was enough. He was enough. They were, despite their fractures, enough.

"Princess." He tested her, one last time.

"No." She pushed her face into his neck, nipped gently with neat little teeth. "No."

He unlaced the simple tie-neck of her gown, laid her bare, peeled back the layers and exposed her to that close little room. It was unassuming but it was sweet, to feel her wings unfurl when he kissed the nubs of her collarbone, when her butterfly's senses ran away with her and took her to a place where colours were brighter, warmer, where she hid her face in his shoulder because she was afraid of the sounds she would make if and when, when, _now_ he touched her again. There were devils in those touches, in the fires they lit, angels in the promises that accompanied them. Her lips went to his shoulder, to the salty flesh that was musky and warm and that would break if she bit down hard enough. She worked that way, in unexplored territory, in places where she had been too selfish and yet too heartbroken to venture into before. She dealt with scars from work and play, tendons which heaved away beneath the scrutiny of her fluttering, the mutualistic fluttering that flowed back and forth between them like a shared lifeline of blood. They murmured to each other, small things, nothings, making obeisance and peace and finding their way back gradually to the place where it all began.

There was a squirming moment of panic when they came together again, for Blair at least, her muscles locking automatically against invasion, invasion of territory that had only once before been conquered – but this was no sewing needle, no ice for the pain, no semblance of virginity stitching her back together and tearing her apart. This was Chuck and Voltaire's knowledge of light in dark places, the way she formed herself around him, the way they welcomed one another home after the longest time wandering.

Then came push.

Pull.

Bend.

Blaze.

Build.

Shatter.

Like chemicals caught between glass and heated beyond reason, shards of the past flew in every direction and flames engulfed them both as they clung. Still the snow fell, irreverent of the golden room where there was a beast with two backs, two hearts beating, two redeemed black tongues, four hands reaching out to shape two faces and to travel down the long lengths of bodies and teach each other how to burn. They were cruel, those two beasts in one beast's skin, him knowing how to play her every note and her spicing her cruelty with kindness until she was subdued or he was, until rage had died out and adoration ruled for a while.

"Is it possible to die from doing that?"

He chuckled – low and arrogant, justifiably so – at the back of his throat. "If so, you have full and express permission to murder me. Repeatedly. Often."

"So when you returned from California, you couldn't have just done that to me instead of all the sabotage?"

"Death was incompatible with all the things I wanted to do with you. It still is."

She shivered, and his fingers caressed her spine and continued the motion downward. "Then…couldn't you have done it very, very slowly?"

"That would be cruel."

"Yes."

"You wouldn't enjoy it."

"No."

"You'd be begging by the end." He smirked. "Or for the end."

"You make me sick."

"All the purring in my ear did intimate such disgust."

She stopped his mouth and his self-satisfaction with hers, awakening a requirement for satisfaction that was undoubtedly mutual. Blair sighed when he rolled her over onto her back, sighed when he traced a line down over her navel, sighed a different kind of sigh when he began exploration with the tips of two fingers. He stroked within her, inside ready sated and newly needy flesh.

"Very, very slowly," Chuck prompted silkily, then watched as her expression twisted into solicited and exquisite agony.

She took pleasure from his knowledge.

He drew knowledge from her love.

* * *

><p><strong><em>I was recently told by an anon on Tumblr that I whine like a child in my requests for reviews - very hurtful, but hopefully not the case? It's so important to me to hear how each chapter makes you feel personally, not just to hear praise. I do apologise if I appear to be preaching at you in that respect.<br>Thanks to:_ Laura, SaturnineSunshine, flipped, aliceeeebeth, Stella296, abelard, Tilly, MegamiTenchi, Blood Red Kiss of Death, Krazy4Spike, Trosev, CBBW3words8letters, Kate2008, BellaB2010, LeftWriter224, , signaturescarf, ggloverxx19, Poinsettia, CBfanhere, dreamgurl, ImprobableGirl, Nikki999, sweetshorti868, arizonarobbins _(tell me you adore Calzona as much as I do)_, Temp02, B _and_ Dr. GG. **


	21. Prometheus

**20. Prometheus**

The dawn light was opalescent, whiting out even the stained glass of the highest windows by the time Chuck woke, tangled in every way possible with Blair's head caught in the crook of his arm. She appeared to be puzzling over something, nose wrinkled, brow furrowed; he passed his hand over the latter, erasing the lines like a hot iron on linen, and she made a disgruntled noise and snuggled closer into his side. Examining the press of her forehead against his ribs, he reflected that he'd been practically swarthy upon arrival in the city, but the cool of New York meant their skins were now almost of a shade – though he could never be as fair as she, she who slathered on rosehip and lemon balm to whiten every inch of flesh – and the similarity pleased him. They were both dark haired but hers shone black sometimes, they were both dark eyed but his verged upon hazel whereas hers were the deep colour of polished wood. They were two of a kind, or maybe even one distilled into two forms. It had certainly seemed that way over the course of the night, barely ever parting but beginning each act where the last had ended in a limitless run of pleasure – but was it pleasure, exactly? Pleasure could be given by anyone, to anyone, while the sensations passing between them had been enough to collapse lungs, break bones, spill blood. They'd snarled and torn at one another, held and soothed each other, exchanged reverences so slowly that the only precursor to climax was the black hole in the centre of each eye. He found he had no breath when she looked up at him, innocent and open and trusting, telling him to guide her, to teach her all over again.

Love was a strange thing, thought Chuck, though it still appeared as if he were ready to die from or for it.

"Blair."

"Mmmm…"

"Blair."

He tried to shake her but she only assumed a sleepily wounded expression and rolled over, lying on her front with hair falling everywhere and obscuring his view.

Bitch.

Contemplating her smooth back, he decided not to leave a note, since he would be returning presently.

There was just something he needed to retrieve from his safe first.

Birds were singing, which was peculiar in a city that was barely stirring with mercifully opaque ice coating the sidewalk. Chuck had pulled on his clothes in slow motion, stealing glances towards the tumbled bed – a blushing cheek, the curve of a brow, a visible pulse beating in puffy cerise lips – between layers, preparing himself for the cold outside despite an immediate desire to crawl back between sheets heady with body heat and sleep all day beside Blair, to feel her little naked feet press unconsciously against his legs and to see her reproachful mouth when he attempted to wake her once, again, again, unnecessarily provoking her until she beat her fists against him and sunk her nails into his spine. Blair soft, yielding, needy was a wonder to behold, but Hell had no fury like Blair Waldorf when beauty sleep scorned her. Actually asleep, however, she looked as seraphic as so ruthless an individual could, and Chuck declined to disturb her when he had business to attend to back at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Her grandmother's muslin gown had slipped onto the floor, and he laid it over the foot of the bed and left through the greenhouse's lift up panel. He would make sure that was boarded up, and soon, especially if certain persons there present might move 'upstairs' to satisfy the wishes of a lover. Upstairs would have to be on this hallowed avenue, of course, with staircases wide enough for grand descents and a conservatory to rival even the late Harold Waldorf's…but upstairs would come later.

It was too much to taint the frosty air with tobacco, so instead Chuck gnawed on the stump of a cigarette to counteract the shaking of his hands. It was cowardly and humiliating to boot, but the fingers locked with Blair's the night before had been anything but steady.

"Damn it," he swore, and lit the smoke.

For several minutes, Chuck leaned against the railing of the Archers' house and exhaled his nerves. He'd kept her stack of forbidden letters on his person so long, and then locked it up when all seemed hopeless; the same applied to the diamond that had cost him all he had at the time, with no way of earning more. Now, he could have spent more and bought ten, twenty rings with flawless canary yellow carats to match her new favourite heirloom, but the stone his bleeding palm had marked upon first rejection was still the one he wanted to give. It was a reminder of the rewards of toil, the importance of perseverance: that in the face of true love, you didn't just give up.

Even if the object of your affection was begging you to.

Ash fell from the ciggie's fiery tip, mingling in grey with the white snow and ice. The sun was strong, even so early, and the pavement cracked as Chuck began to move again, discarding contemplation with the butt flicked away from him to sizzle and die in sleet.

What made a man, exactly, the pieces and forms: this morning it felt as if his ribs were shifting, lifting, caging his restless heart to keep it safe. His strides grew longer, almost to the point of sprinting, and blood roared between his ears. He could feel the fading reminders of Blair's kisses on his mouth, on his face like electricity which drove away the freezing temperatures and made it hotter than Hell inside his chest. Where could the dark things go now, now she was light, now she filled him from top to bottom and beyond his brain and the butterflies in his stomach? He would have to find new homes for his doubts, for his fear, for the stabs in the gut of envy when she was with Asher Hornsby, with Eric van der Woodsen, both permissible though he would never again countenance her tormenting him with Louis Grimaldi. The celebrated Mrs Blair Bass would rest her fingers on his arm now, would raise her chin towards him and expect the first dance before he'd even offered it. She wasn't one for exclusivity, she would want to wander and be admired, but he'd watch. He'd grip the nape of her neck with gently sadistic fingers when she flirted too hard just to be a tease, and she'd melt. She always melted when he touched her there, and even the white flash of it from across the room was enough to drive his teeth together and up into his skull.

There were no longer any words for his sentiments, his feelings.

All he had left were actions.

"Mr Bass," the desk clerk greeted him obsequiously. "Good morning."

"Good morning, Dexter." And surely he could even afford to call the staff by their names on such a day. The clerk looked ready to fall off his seat, and his client grinned at him like a man possessed.

The elevator attendant had a name, but Chuck didn't know it, so he tipped him enough money to purchase a small diamond or a very expensive hooker instead. He was aware he was behaving oddly but also of how enjoyable it was, his waistcoat buttoned over the flannel shirt he'd first disdained but now loved quite dearly. It was a mania to love, you believed you loved everything until you returned to that which you loved the most and realised you could never love anything but that, not ever again, not as long as it lived and breathed or even after. As such, his plan for the day consisted of proposing, being accepted and then finding a dozen different ways to make Blair Waldorf's toes curl before lunch. There would be no time for simply watching her lie still and doze again, though he fully intended to make her drape herself over a chaise longue one day and have somebody paint her. The arch of her lips he could capture himself, in infinitely satisfying ways, but to have them immortalised would be enough for the hours they would have to spend away from one another while things were planned and bought and paid for and she denied him, as she undoubtedly would, remaining as chaste as was humanely possible until God Almighty had sanctioned tertiary consummation.

Chuck set no store by God, who only entered virtuous bodies.

He liked to be the one doing the entering.

That thought was pleasant enough to dull the sound of the door of his suite swinging shut behind him, but then a wisp of a raven clad figure slunk out from behind it and bent her knees in an overly respectful curtsey.

Jenny.

"This is…unexpected."

His erstwhile pupil declined to answer. Her bare white arms were almost skeletal, tendons popping, and her cheeks had fallen backwards into her head. She almost skipped as she performed a small circle around him, then announced, "I can smell her on you." She giggled inexplicably, black lined eyes too large for their sockets and blue hot as they rolled. It was like standing close to an animal in a cage, an animal that looked as if it might snap. "Was it everything you ever dreamed? Every night when you were alone, every night when you knew she was mere feet away, wearing next to nothing…" Her teeth gleamed in an bestial smile. "Did she smile, Chuck? Or did she scream?"

Chuck hadn't felt the lack of fire until she stood before him, and now he was chilled and icily furious. It roiled within him, as if the butterflies had become snakes at such an affront to their existence. Jenny Humphrey knew nothing about them and what they'd created, and what had been created in her former workplace only the night before. She was poison, and he was ready to spit poison. "If you know what's good for you, you won't talk about her in that manner. I stand by what I said before, and what I say now is just as true: if you slander Blair, in the tabloids or in my hearing or the hearing of anyone who matters, if you damage anything of mine, then there will be no hand feeding so you can bite it again. The whorehouse will be the highest you can aim for. So don't dare to talk ask me about what she does and speak of her as if she were a –"

"Slut? Tramp? Oh, but that's precisely what she is." Her Fabergé blue gaze was bright with glee. "She rode you and dug her nails in so you'd dance to her tune with no choice in the matter. I, in good conscience, cannot let that happen."

He started towards her, but she stepped to one side.

"You wouldn't hurt me."

"A quick death wouldn't hurt you, only hinder your tongue."

"Proud and protective, such wonderful traits in a partner." She lit one of her dratted black cigarettes and exhaled with calculated languor, red lips curving and grey smoke curling. "Traits which Blair Waldorf has had enough of for one lifetime, don't you agree?" Jenny advanced, black lace falling like a spider's web around her feet, no fear on her face in response to the rage that had immobilised Chuck's. "You're out of the game," she whispered. "You won't admit you fucked her because you want to do it for the rest of your life, but I want you, Charles Bass, for the rest of my life. And I know you don't love me, and I know I'm making sure you don't by manipulating you like this."

"Like what?" He managed, fists clenching rhythmically as he fought the desire to throttle her.

"You already know." Red, grey, black, white in her face and mad eyes. "You're going to marry me, and you're going to love me one day because you and I are destined, cut from the same cloth, the he and the she of the same creation. But until you do love me as I love you, you're going to marry me because if you don't, I will tell. I will tell every last man, women and child with influence and a name or money and a name or a blabbermouth and a name that the woman you do love is no virgin, and she has no way to disprove it. She can't submit to a medical examination, but refusing to do so is suspect. No one can deny she's spent time with many different men of late, trying to plot against or thwart you. She's so neatly stitched up into this mess that if you had any self-respect at all, you would have bagged her and thrown her into the Hudson to drown, since death would be better than disgrace for a girl like that. There is no way out of this for her. There is no way away from this for you."

The pain was too deep to even consider facing, the anger so violent and the hatred so vehement that he knew even a single step would lead to little Jenny Humphrey's neck being snapped, little Jenny Humphrey who had clutched at straws until she could touch the stars with them. The idea of setting aside the love of his life to marry this fiend was laughable, impossible, and it slowed his body to a crawl. Numbness settled over Chuck, wrapping its deceptive arms around him to protect him from the force of the blow, and what would follow: heart attack, aneurysm, seizure, unconsciousness. It was as soft as the snow, and it settled upon him just as tenderly.

"Oh, precious." Her fingers stuttered over his frozen mouth. "Can't you see it's for the best? I'm the best for you, and the best thing you can do for her is act like you got what you wanted and that's that. We don't want her running off to the Five Points for another attempt at purification, do we? Better she has to bind her heart back together than her legs." She stroked his bloodless cheek. "Doesn't she deserve a chance at happiness without you? Or would you rather she burns?"

She manoeuvred him to the writing desk. She made him sit.

She worked him like a puppet.

Yet Chuck was not cowed by her, was not afraid of her. He would be the one to save Blair as he had saved her from the wretched places of the city before, although he would have to go about it in a manner that would break and end them both. When she hated him, then she would be safe. Then he could spy on her from around corners, and die observing the man she married and the children she bore, and she would never know that he loved her the most, more than that man she'd chosen, enough to commit the worst atrocity, enough to carve out her heart if it meant she would no longer care for him and be in danger. He was truer in his passion than any man alive, and more twisted by it – and he was weak, because no cost would be too great to bury himself in the sweetness of her hair one last time. Even one last smile would be enough, one last look as she slipped behind the velvet curtains of the life she deserved. Why had he not woken her so she would smile? Why could he barely remember the last time he'd seen her smile, his mind filing it away as unimportant though it was the most important thing in the world?

He put his pen to paper, and with three lines he killed them.

Jenny sighed and touched his arm, and the limb spasmed without volition. He pinned it to his side with the other, squeezing his ribs until they groaned.

"I thought…"

"We're to be married," Chuck said flatly. "That makes you untouchable."

"But after?"

"That makes you untouchable," he repeated, and then gave himself over to darkness.

_**~#~**_

Blair woke with the aroma of earth in her nostrils, fresh and primal. She felt primal too that morning, and a small growl escaped her as she rolled her shoulders and something popped back into place. She wriggled experimentally, and was unsurprised to find the bed empty. Chuck was Chuck, and not himself without a three piece suit unmarred by damp and creases. He would find her, perhaps not even today, but soon, and then the chips would fall. They would fall in her favour, of that there could be no doubt. After all, love was a glorious thing, and she ached from it both in her body and in her soul.

"Chuck?" She tried, just in case.

"Miss Blair?" Came the harried reply.

The sheets churned as Blair kicked her legs in a bizarre kind of guilty bliss. Let Dorota see, let them all see. Let her be wheeled out like an exhibit, the Wanton Socialite, so all the so-called great and good could peer at her and exclaim at her wickedness. Let them pay a dollar for the privilege of mocking her pleasure only because they were too shrivelled to get any for themselves.

"Miss Blair!"

"Dorota."

"What has happened to you?"

"I," Blair proclaimed. "Am in love. And I'm famished, so you need to bring me a plate of something and draw me a bath."

"In love?" Dorota repeated, as if she'd never heard of such a thing. Then her brows drew together. "Has Mister Chuck been here? You know, here. _Here._"

"Yes."

"When did Mister Chuck…leave?"

"I don't know, I was asleep."

"And you let him go?"

"I was asleep, Dorota."

"Miss Blair." The maid drew herself up to her full, albeit diminutive height. "I did not raise you to be a common woman. A common woman lazes in bed and lets a man leave when he is done with her, as if she has no worth, as if he is far more important than she is! I will get you some food and you will have a bath, but then you will dress nicely and have your usual visiting hours in the parlour, not just with Miss Serena, and not just with Mr Hornsby. Mister Chuck may come to you, if he wishes, but you will not waste all day lying there and smiling and waiting for him to do so!" She was quite out of breath by time the diatribe was over, and not a little red in the face. Blair propped herself up on one elbow, her features lovely but stern.

"Do you think he won't come, then?"

"He will come, Miss Blair," was the definite reply. "Or I will fetch him."

Déjà vu swirled as thickly in the air as snow as Blair was helped into the tub, the cricks in her back and thighs unknotting almost as soon they touched warm water. There were no tears, only this time it was because there was no requirement for grief, and fewer marks on her body. If anything, she had marked him, avoiding connection but scratching and nipping and smirking when he snarled. She'd wanted to hear pleas, at least once the awe and white light of reunion had died away and they were prepared to be unfair to one another again. He did plead with her. He did make her plead. The recollections of each were enough to make her laugh aloud and splash while Dorota worked over her tired limbs with a washcloth and twice rinsed her hair. The attar of roses rising from Grandmother Waldorf's dress was scrubbed off Blair's skin, to be replaced with her usual lavender and orange blossom and bespoke perfume scent. She smoothed cold cream over the worst of her few bruises, gasping even at her own tentative touch on flushed, swollen flesh that still bloomed pale apricot and purple.

Everything was different. Her hair was thicker, glossier, falling in heavy ringlets down her bare back before it was dressed neatly and piled above her brow so that stays could be layered over her chemise and the laces pulled tight, but never too tight by loving hands. Blair would always have them tighter than Dorota approved of, but today of all days she ought to be incomparable, sixteen inches in the waist and smaller when held between hands. She was glittering when she caught her own reflection in the mirror, not from her deep green day dress, not from the pearls dripping over her clavicle, not from her rosy bitten lips or the white flash of teeth behind them. She was simply glowing, full and satisfied, expectant and unafraid.

It would've been unsurprising to hear a symphony as she tripped downstairs.

The first caller of the day was one Mr Frederick Codrose. Blair stifled a giggle as she remember the ennui she had fought to disguise upon his last visit, when her mother was so convinced that this wet fish of a man was meant for her daughter. Mr Codrose still had that look of being more familiar with his hostess than he'd ever really been, as if they had shared a secret dalliance and now only communicated its existence with winks and bows and leers. She was too tempted to spike his coffee, but a suitably boring Codrose vomiting over the Turkey and silk rugs would be of no use to anyone. Besides, she knew well and good why she had the devil in her that morning, and it would have to be restrained until later.

"Mr Codrose."

"Miss Waldorf, you look utterly radiant."

She neither accepted nor negated the compliment, offering him the corner of a smile.

"In fact, you outdo the sparkling frost itself."

"I suppose the weather is now temperate enough for travel, if you yourself managed the journey unscathed." Blair wouldn't have minded if he'd broken a wheel or his neck, but if Eleanor had taught her anything, it was the importance of a good façade.

"Quite temperate, though I didn't quite come to you unscathed…"

Mr Codrose took an unsolicited seat and Blair, who longed to lounge in the Turkish corner with her eyes rising smokily over a book cover and wait with her magnificent sixteen inch waist to be swept away and ravished – naturally not by Mr Codrose – reluctantly took the seat opposite him. Tea was brought in, and the gentleman added four lumps of sugar and almost a quart of cream before he was content to take a sip. Blair took hers black, with lemon, and very nearly forgot herself enough to eat in front of him. As his card had been sent up before Dorota could get her a plate of anything, she was starving, but still she pushed the plate of sugared wafers across the coffee table towards her guest and bade him eat, which he did with gusto. He was growing a wispy moustache, which occasionally dipped in his tea, and Blair couldn't help wondering whether he'd have to wring it out before their interview was over.

"Some damage to your carriage? Such a shame."

"You keep a carriage, Miss Waldorf, I believe?"

"Yes, and a good stable. The lad Will tends all our animals very well, though I don't spend as much time with them as he does. It isn't proper, you understand."

_You let Chuck Bass make love to you last night,_ her body prompted her, a weak pulse beginning below her navel at the very recollection. _And that was certainly not proper._

"Naturally, it isn't right for you ladies to be exposed to all that sweating, heaving horseflesh."

_I bet you'd sweat and heave like horseflesh if a woman ever so much as gave you a second glance_.

Instead of voicing her uncharitable musings, Blair smiled sweetly. "More tea?"

Once the socially acceptable half hour was over, Mr Codrose took his leave with many a flourish of his gloves and his hat and more comparisons to sparkling frost than were heard even in poetry on the subject. His moustache dripped a little onto his bottom lip, and Blair shuddered at the image and subsided into the pile of cushions she had been craving with a sigh.

A cat suddenly entered the room, as if it had never been away, as if it had every right to be there again. Its owner arched a sceptical brow when it slunk onto her lap, purring fit to bust. 'Cat' was an arrogant, standoffish sort of creature who loved nobody but Blair, and that only infrequently. He would disappear for months on end, only to arrive on the Waldorfs' doorstep with no clue as to where he'd been. Currently, Blair didn't care, and pulled on his silky ears. It was her opinion that those who didn't keep a permanent residence in New York didn't deserve names, so the cat was called Cat, much to her father's amusement and mother's chagrin. He was a large, orange animal with great amber eyes, and he liked to stare at people. He mostly liked to stare at Blair, but that was because she petted him, and he approved of that.

"Miss Blair? Miss Blair!" Dorota hurried into the parlour, brandishing an envelope. Cat yowled at the intrusion and leapt off Blair's lap, making for unknown climes and a month long pilgrimage to a place where there were mice. Blair, for her part, merely frowned at her maid.

"It's just a letter, Dorota."

"It comes from the Waldorf-Astoria!"

"And?"

"From the suite of Mr Charles B. Bass, Esq., lately of California!"

Why would he write? Why was he not here to see her, to take her hand and mock or kiss or bless the fingers as he had so many times before? Blair grabbed for the envelope, searching for symbolism before she had even torn it open to reveal high quality notepaper that was ivory and almost bare, free of any writing but three lines in the dead centre.

_It's just a game.  
>I hate to lose.<br>You're free to go._

"Miss Blair?"

Silence.

"Miss Blair?"

But she couldn't answer. She couldn't, she wouldn't ever again, because she couldn't understand, not even as all the clocks in the house begun to chime in an abrupt, tinkling, horrible din. She couldn't speak as she moved, as she began to run, as she banged open doors and wrenched at locks and flung herself back into the heart of it all, back into the place where petals fell soft and pretty and perfectly pink because everything fell, fell like she way falling, all the way down, again, again, again.

For the second time in its existence, tears wet the soil of the Waldorfs' greenhouse as frantic hands wrenched up every peony and threw each to the brazier's flames.

* * *

><p><em><strong>I always planned this ending (based upon the events of The Luxe and Rumours) in order to lay the foundations for a sequel (based upon the events of Envy and Splendour), so please don't get mad with me if the ending didn't fit your expectations. Get mad with Anna Godbersen, who broke my heart with this ending in The Luxe series.<br>****Thanks to: **_**aliceeeebeth, Laura, signaturescarf, D, MegamiTenchi, bookworm455, Trosev, BellaB2010, BeautifullyExcruciatingLove, Blood Red Kiss of Death, Krazy4Spike, Kate2008, abelard, louboutinlove, LeftWriter224, CBfanhere, ggoddess, Lyla, SaturnineSunshine, Arazadia, thegoodgossipgirl, Temp02, flipped _and_ dreamgurl. _Writing this fic and your support for it really helped me through my exams and leaving school, so thank you, and please stay tuned for the epilogue. Oh, and you may now throw projectiles at will._**_**  
><strong>_


	22. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

They were head-over-heels in love, or so the papers had it, and that was why the wedding took place on the first of December as opposed to waiting for more clement weather and a more fashionable time of year. The New York Standard ran the story too, although its star reporter was strangely silent on the delicious gossip, making only a passing reference in his column and preferring to talk about the dubious origins of an English duchess just arrived in town; there was no greater courtesy Asher could do his fallen comrade, a person who hadn't been seen since the night before the formal announcement. It was said that she'd succumbed to a fever, and was keeping to her bed while sickly cream silk was cut to pattern and then fitted over the blushing bride.

She carried a bouquet of scarlet roses.

She wore a flashing emerald ring.

Engraved Tiffany bells were gifted to all the guests, complete with dates and initials: CBB & JTH, Dec. 1st, 1899.

He waited for her at the altar with his gaze fathomless and black, his hair brushed smooth, his skin and countenance still handsome but a little singed looking. She was radiant, triumphant, the dog who had its day draped in a gauzy veil and victory. She was the very epitome of a bride, and all of New York knew at whose feet they should now worship.

Blair fed the fire with letter after letter after love letter, with their binding bootlace, with that gown of her grandmother's which still held the scent of roses and ecstasy. She watched the flames leap up to consume the hand that had consumed the paper and her heart, and her eyes so dry and empty of tears that the firelight made them crackle. She watched until every last scrap had been destroyed, and then she voided her stomach over the hearthrug, responding to the nausea she now felt every morning and especially that one – the morning after Chuck's wedding, which dawned blood red in the eastern sky.

* * *

><p><em><strong>I am, as ever, grateful for and humbled by the time and love you've given me. See you at the sequel...<br>Thanks to:**_**bla-bl-bl, Maribells, katharienne, flipped, Laura, chantibeblogging, Cb, BeautifullyExcruciatingLove, Kate2008, dreamgurl, thegoodgossipgirl, Lalai, Eternally Romantic, Krazy4Spike, CBBW3words8letters, EK, SaturnineSunshine, Arazadia, Lucy.Q, purple-passionate, , yahaira, Trosev, Blood Red Kiss of Death, GEH, ChairLuver, drewiswickedcool, fiona249, ParfaitCherie, avrilk, BellaB2010, Whatevergirl1985, L, loveyouforever77 _and_ BW.**_**  
><strong>_


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